Working behind the scenes, creative collectives power fashion's boldest moments

The Star

3 days ago

For two days in April during the Salone del Mobile design fair in Milan, fashion brand Miu Miu hosted a book club.
It was quite an undertaking, one that involved only a small amount of actual reading.
Produced to the exacting taste of Miuccia Prada, the event, a cultural experience of sorts to promote the arts, involved the creation of a 96-page branding guide, which included a colour palette of six shades of orange, blue and ochre, as well as a custom logotype and its application across posters, banners, digital ads, menus, coasters, pencils, notebooks and more.
Guests sat on tasselled couches lit by table lamps. The dress code was Miu Miu, of course.
Executed with the help of two external agencies – 2x4, a New York design firm founded by Michael Rock, Susan Sellers and Georgie Stout in 1994, and Kennedy, a London experiential design agency founded by Jan Kennedy in 2000, the second annual Miu Miu Literary Club attracted more than 2,000 attendees, among them International Booker Prize winner Geetanjali Shree.
Both 2x4 and Kennedy have collaborated on all manner of 'activations', as events like this are known in marketing-speak, but after decades of operating independently, the firms are now under the same ownership, having recently sold majority stakes to a rapidly growing entity called the Independents.
In fact, they are two of 13 such small companies to be gobbled up in the past two years, joining a total of 19 agencies worldwide.
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A unique collective
The Independents was founded in 2017 when Isabelle and Olivier Chouvet and a third partner, Alexandre Monteux, merged K2, their Shanghai event and production company, with Karla Otto, a veteran fashion and luxury public relations firm.
Together, their clients included Chanel, Cartier, Celine, Moncler, Valentino and Nike.
The Independents' original funding came from private equity firm Cathay Capital, which was bought out in 2023 with a new round of US$580mil (approximately RM2.5bil) funding led by a bank pool, TowerBrook Capital Partners, and Banijay, a strategic long-term investor that has the opportunity to increase its investment in 2026.
The Chouvets remain majority investors.
The couple, both French, made their mark in Asia with a string of entrepreneurial ventures, including Chinese flash sale site Mei.com, which Olivier Chouvet and his partners sold to Alibaba in 2015.
They set up K2 in 2002. Their first project was the introduction of Chanel's J12 watch in Japan.
By 2017, Isabelle Chouvet had developed a network that made her firm the go-to for luxury brands looking to do world-class activations – the public relations, branding, events, production and social media – in Japan, China and Korea.
Diana Ross at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute benefit gala in New York on May 5. Ross' arrival at the Met Gala was implemented by Prodject, a firm that helps carry out Anna Wintour's vision. Photo: Reuters 'I wanted to do what I did in Asia worldwide,' she said of founding the Independents. 'I only had the experience and capabilities in Asia, so I immediately looked for a partner in a different geographic location.'
Karla Otto, a German-born publicist who opened her agency in 1982 in Milan, had the connections Chouvet sought.
With Chouvet as CEO, the Independents group has gone on an ambitious acquisition spree.
Names like Bureau Betak, Prodject, Lucien Pages, Kitten and Sunshine may not mean much to the average civilian, but within the increasingly all-encompassing world of luxury, fashion and cultural branding, the agencies in the Independents portfolio are as blue chip as they come.
When Alessandro Michele wanted to turn his Autumn/Winter 2025 Paris fashion show for Valentino into a giant, blood-red David Lynchian public toilet, he hired Bureau Betak to stage the scene.
For the past 14 years, Anna Wintour has not planned a Met Gala without Prodject, the firm responsible for implementing her vision – whether 'Camp', 'Heavenly Bodies', 'Sleeping Beauties' or 'Superfine' – inside the museum.
When Dior set about staging a Villa Dior presentation in Dali, China, it worked with K2 to realise it.
The Independents now has 1,200 employees across offices in Barcelona, Spain; Beijing and Shanghai; Dubai, United Arab Emirates; Hong Kong; Jeddah and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; London; Los Angeles; Milan; Munich; New York; Paris; Seoul, South Korea; Singapore; and Tokyo.
The 2x4 agency and Terminal 9 Studios, a documentary film production company in Paris, are the most recent acquisitions.
It's obvious why Chouvet would want to bundle these firms under one roof. The Independents group reported US$800mil (RM3.4bil) in revenue for 2024.
She is far from the first to try to consolidate and capitalise on creative agencies.
Venture capital roll-ups, in which a group of investors buy a bunch of agencies, eliminate redundancies, install a central administrative staff to cut costs, and eventually take it public or sell to a megagroup like Publicis are common practice.
These deals come with pressure to deliver return on investment.
Many of the agencies that have signed on with the Independents have spent their careers avoiding this acquisition model.
'It might work for tech companies or other things, but it doesn't work for creative industries,' Rock said. 'Whatever made that company great in the beginning is completely lost.'
Yet Rock and his associates, whose clients include Prada, Chanel Arts and Culture, Nike, Instagram and Lincoln Center, signed over a majority stake to the Independents, which, from the outside, looks like a roll-up despite protests to the contrary.
Chouvet said there is no exit strategy at the moment, and she has no financial or growth obligations to her investors.
'It's working so well because all of the interests are aligned, and everyone feels they are stronger by being together,' Chouvet said.
'There remains independence. That's why our name is the Independents.'
The point of the group is to create a united network of partners who can work together, if they want to.
'By no means is it a forced march,' said Keith Baptista, a founder of Prodject. 'Nobody's telling me, 'You must work with this person'.'
Many of the agencies have already shared clients for years.
Bureau Betak does the design and production for Saint Laurent and Jacquemus fashion shows, and Lucien Pages does their PR.
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Why consolidate?
So what is the point, and where's the catch?
If everyone was happily working together for decades on end with no shortage of business, why consolidate?
Otto and Alexandre de Betak used the sale to step back from the day-to-day of their agencies.
She essentially retired, and he is now focusing on an art and architecture business.
The practice of a principal exiting the business after a three-year earn-out period is common practice after a company is acquired.
The idea that Chouvet is hoovering up a bunch of companies whose success hinges on the singular vision of the founder, just when the founder is looking to retire, is not a negligible one.
'You get to a certain age and you think about those kinds of things,' Rock said.
'We weren't looking to cash out like an exit strategy. We still want to work.'
Why wouldn't he? A few weeks later, Rock was reached by phone to confirm the Pantone colours chosen for the Miu Miu Literary Club.
He was at the airport, flying back from a weeklong photo shoot for Chanel in southern France.
'I'm feeling very ragged,' Rock said. 'But we were at Coco Chanel's house on the Riviera, so it's kind of like... can't really complain.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company