Why H&M Chose Balmain

Olivier Rousteing´s Balmain X H&Mcollection is already causing a buzz in the fashion world, before it has even launched - something that comes as no surprise to the team at H&M.

"He's been on our list. We knew him from before, when he was at Roberto Cavalli and we worked with Cavalli, and we knew that he was going to do great things at Balmain, we just wanted to wait maybe a couple of years while he settled in," Ann-Sofie Johansson, H&M's head of design, revealed. "We waited for the moment that we were ready, and he was ready to make a collaboration."

H&M has worked with a long list of established designers, but Johansson conceded that her team still learn new things with each collaboration. With Rousteing, they were impressed by his work ethos: "He works really closely with his team and is a team player, which hasn't always been the case as the designers we have worked with have all been very different personalities. Olivier has a clear vision, but he also listens - he listens to advice and input and then he listens again, he's very easy to work with in that sense."

As for keeping the collaboration secret while working with one of fashion's most prolific social media stars, Johansson revealed that keeping the collaborations secret becomes a bigger challenge with each new launch - not least for the designer involved. "Olivier had to really hold himself back!" she laughed.