On x Zendaya collection and the End of Borrowed Cultural Authority
The old hierarchy of taste is cracking, and the crack runs straight through luxury’s throat. The On x Zendaya collection exposed a new rule of culture showing that the brands that still make things people actually use are now better positioned to define cool than the brands that only sell us aspiration.
For decades, fashion houses and prestige labels acted as if cultural authority flowed downhill from old money and old gatekeepers. But in a market saturated with content, where the consumer sees everything and believes almost nothing, relevance belongs to brands that can prove themselves in motion. On understands motion. Luxury understands posture. Zendaya just made the difference impossible to ignore.
The On x Zendaya collection is so much more than your typical celebrity campaign. A face on a billboard is a rented image, but a fully co-created line is a transfer of authorship.
An endorsement deal is designed to borrow attention with minimal risk. The brand keeps control, the talent provides heat, and everyone pretends that is creativity. Co-creation, specifically co-creation in fashion brands, is messier and far more revealing. It forces the brand to expose its internal logic and show how product decisions are made and how design language can travel beyond the core athlete without collapsing into costume.
If this is speaking to you, I’ll send the next one when it’s ready.
The On x Zendaya Collaboration and the Shift from Endorsement to Co-Creation
On’s move is troublesome to luxury because it demonstrates that cultural credibility no longer requires luxury validation, a significant turning point in the balance of performance brands vs luxury fashion.
For years, performance brands wanted legitimacy from the fashion establishment. They needed the nod from editors and stylists before they could be taken seriously outside sport. Now the chain has reversed. A performance-native brand can bring in Zendaya, work with Law Roach, release a Spike Jonze film, and arrive in culture with more authority than many heritage labels that still think a runway and a logo are enough.
The brand does not need permission. It is manufacturing its own permission. See it for yourself:
Luxury still owns scarcity and history, but history is not the same thing as relevance. Scarcity used to function as a kind of cultural gravity. If something was hard to get, people assumed it mattered. But now scarcity without meaning just creates frustration.
The modern consumer is not impressed by the mere fact that a bag is expensive or a sneaker is unobtainable. They want an object to do something in their life whether it be signaling taste, solving a wardrobe problem, fitting a body, surviving a commute, photographing well, and withstand the ugliness of daily use. Performance brands have an advantage here because utility gives them an anchor. Luxury often has to invent the anchor after the fact.
The On x Zendaya collection lands hard. It fuses utility with narrative in a way luxury has been trying, and usually failing, to imitate. Luxury collaborations often feel like hostage negotiations between product and image. The product is already locked, the celebrity is invited late, and the result is a theatrical object that looks expensive but understands nothing about how people live.
We have seen this movie before. H&M designer collaborations turned into annual hype rituals with a line around the block, a press cycle, a brief illusion of democratization, and then a pile of clothes that mostly served as evidence that scarcity can manufacture desire only when the customer believes there is substance underneath it. Much of the time, there was not. The attention was real, but the attachment was not.
Even worse are the celebrity partnerships that confuse recognition with relevance. Pepsi’s Kendall Jenner ad became a case study in how badly a brand can misread its own power. It mistook the social aura of celebrity for moral and cultural legitimacy, then collapsed under the weight of its own cynicism.
The brand treated culture like a prop room. On did the opposite, and the On x Zendaya collaboration makes that inversion visible. It treated culture like an operating system.
Zendaya was not pasted onto the surface. She was brought into the machine.
“What’s the best idea and what’s the way to make the best piece? I want everyone to feel included in the process of this because I want everyone to feel like there is something in there for them.” – Zendaya
And Law Roach did not merely dress the product. He translated performance into a fashion language consumers already understand. And Spike Jonze did not just make an ad. He gave the launch the texture of a short film, which matters because film can expand meaning without flattening it into a sales pitch.
That creative triangle is the real innovation here; product, stylist, storyteller. Most brands cannot assemble it because their organizations are built for control, and not at all for collaboration. By the time the product reaches market, the idea has been sanded into something safe, generic, and… forgettable.
On and Zendaya broke that logic by letting the talent shape the product instead of merely decorate it; it’s something the On x Zendaya collaboration executes with unusual clarity. It does create friction, but friction is where credibility comes from. The consumer can smell when a brand is over-directed. They can also smell when a brand has surrendered too much. On found the narrow path between those two failures.
The collection is a proof of concept for how brand power is shifting across the culture economy. The old model treated celebrities as distribution channels. The new model treats talent as a co-author of product relevance changing the incentive structure. When a celebrity is just a channel, the brand chases visibility. When a celebrity helps shape the object, the brand chases durability. Visibility decays. Durability compounds. Plain and simple, the core difference between hype and infrastructure.
Performance Brands Are Building Culture From Within
The economic logic is obvious once you stop pretending brand building is magic. On’s apparel business grew more than 75% in constant currency, and the brand crossed 3 billion Swiss francs in total 2025 revenue. That kind of growth means the company has real leverage to push beyond footwear into lifestyle categories that carry better margins and deeper customer attachment.
Footwear builds credibility because it is where a performance brand proves its technical seriousness. Apparel scales the relationship because it lives closer to identity. A shopper may buy running shoes because they trust the engineering, but they return for apparel because the brand begins to fit their self-image. That is where the money is, and On knows it.
For me, the On x Zendaya collection sparks a couple of very interesting questions. Can a running brand carry fashion consumers without alienating athletes? Can it move from the track to the street without becoming a parody of itself? On’s answer is to prove that performance can become a cultural style code on its own terms.
See now why it’s a real threat to luxury? Luxury has depended for too long on the assumption that style belongs to heritage and performance belongs to function. On collapses that distinction. It says the function is the style.
That claim would be easier to dismiss if luxury itself were not so visibly dependent on borrowed relevance. High fashion has spent years trying to absorb sneakers and streetwear in order to stay young. The strategy worked for a while because luxury had money and narrative discipline.
But the longer it leaned on culture from outside itself, the more hollow the original authority became. The prestige house that once dictated taste now often follows it, dressing up after the fact what the culture already made visible. Luxury still knows how to make expensive objects. It does not automatically know how to make objects that feel necessary. Performance brands do.
The power dynamic here is brutal. Luxury sells distance. Performance sells proximity. In a stable hierarchy, distance looks refined. In an unstable media environment, distance looks out of touch. Consumers do not live in cathedrals. They live in gyms, streets, airports, offices, and phone screens. They want brands that can move with them, not hover above them.
On’s advantage is that it does not need to fake a relationship with real life. Its product begins there.
That gives it a kind of cultural immunity that luxury can only mimic with expensive theatrics.
Look at what Zendaya brings to the equation. She is one of the rare public figures who carries cross-demographic trust without looking manufactured.
Most celebrity-brand partnerships fail because the talent is either too generic or too overexposed to feel catalytic. Zendaya is different. She can move between film, fashion, and youth culture without looking like a marketing vehicle. And that makes her ideal for a co-created line, because co-creation requires the talent to contribute aesthetic judgment on top of the fame. She functions less like a billboard and more like a design input.
Furthermore, a lesser launch would have leaned on product photography and a congratulatory press release. Jonze brings a different kind of legitimacy, of artistic intelligence, drawing a distinction between a campaign and culture. Ads tell you what to buy. Cultural objects tell you how to feel while deciding. Jonze’s involvement signals that On understands the launch must live in memory, after it’s done feeding the algorithm.
This strategy is not purely aesthetic, either; it gets at how brands build cultural relevance in a market that no longer trusts surface-level storytelling. It is a direct response to the current limits of brand trust.
People no longer believe a brand because it says the right things. They believe it because its product behavior matches its story. Co-creation is a trust machine because it links story to object. A talent cannot hide behind a logo if their input affects silhouette, fabrication, proportion, or wearability. The collaboration becomes legible in the garment itself.
Co-creation is stronger than endorsement. Endorsement asks the audience to trust a relationship while co-creation asks them to evaluate a result.
Smaller performance brands should pay attention here, but not to the celebrity part. The celebrity is not the lesson. The lesson is depth. Most brands think collaboration means attaching a name to a finished object. That is lazy because it treats culture as a garnish.
The smarter move is to bring the talent in before the product hardens, then define clear zones of authorship. For example, performance to the brand and aesthetic direction to the collaborator.
You do not earn “lifestyle credibility” by being seen once. You earn it by being repeated. Repeat purchase across categories tells the truth. Organic styling adoption tells the truth. Audience migration beyond the core runner tells the truth. A performance brand that attracts non-runners without losing runners has done something rare because it has expanded identity without dissolving utility. That is the path On is on. The fact that the collection exists at all proves that performance brands no longer have to choose between legitimacy and aspiration. They can manufacture both.
On and Zendaya are exposing a larger weakness in how institutions think about influence. For years, the easiest way to read cultural power was through luxury because luxury had the most visible symbols of exclusion and prestige. But in the platform era, symbols are no longer enough.
Culture now rewards objects that can travel across contexts without losing charge. That favors brands with technical roots, because technical roots imply function, and function keeps a brand honest. Luxury can still produce beauty, but beauty alone does not command an audience that has learned to mistrust spectacle. Performance brands can offer beauty plus proof.
The On x Zendaya collection reads as a turning point rather than a stunt. It demonstrates that the future of prestige belongs to brands that can build from within their own logic instead of borrowing legitimacy from the old gatekeepers.
The performance sector is not “crossing over.” It is doing something more aggressive and more durable, it is building a new center of culture from the inside out. Luxury spent decades acting as if it could absorb the energy of sport without changing its own structure. On is showing the opposite. A performance brand can absorb fashion and celebrity without giving up its core. That is a more powerful form of expansion than luxury ever mastered.
Luxury’s monopoly on meaning is dead, and good riddance. The culture market does not need more brands that trade in inherited status and call it taste. It needs brands that can justify their place in the world through use and collaboration.
On and Zendaya are proving that the old hierarchy is broken for good. The brands that make people move, dress, and live better are taking the stage from the brands that simply inherited it. That is a healthier order. It is also a harsher one. In the end, culture should belong to the companies that earn attention by making something real, not to the ones that rent prestige and mistake it for power.
The On x Zendaya collection is live right now →
