Collaborations with designers appear to be working for Hennes & Mauritz. The Swedish fashion chain will be launching yet another limited designer collection with a jewellery range by jeweller Solange Azagury-Partridge. Azagury-Partridge is the former creative director of luxury jeweller Boucheron, which is owned by the French luxury conglomerate PPR. She will be designing about 40 pieces for the limited H&M collection, which will launch on 25 November, only two weeks after Stella McCartney's collection for H&M hits the shops.

This collaboration is thought to be the first time a luxury jeweller works together with a mass-market chain and reflects the growing taste of consumers for designer products at cheaper prices. Although British chains like Debenhams and M&S have made the same type of partnerships in the UK , H&M is the only one to do so on an international scale; the Stella McCartney collection will be sold in 400 shops in 22 countries. In an interview with the Financial Times earlier this month, H&M chief executive Rolf Eriksen told the FT that collaborations with designers blurred the boundaries between luxury goods and mass-market products.

"Customers are buying something from Prada or something like that and buying a shirt from H&M or something from Tesco. What lots of customers want is value for money and quality and they are mixing much more. Design is not just a matter of price." According to Azagury-Partridge the word 'luxury', in the traditional sense, is becoming "increasingly meaningless".

www.hm.com 26 October 2005