Does it make sense to build a brand around the fame of a TikTok star? Maybe yes if Charli D'Amelio is involved

Hollister, the "younger" brother of Abercrombie & Fitch, recently announced the upcoming launch of Social Tourist, a new brand founded in collaboration with TikTok Queen Charli D'Amelio and her sister Dixie. Clearly, given the enormity of D'Amelio's social following, it's a global operation that should, supposedly, launch the definitive "Gen Z brand" – a brand capable of replicating the extraordinary phenomenon that occurred about ten years ago with Abercrombie & Fitch in the golden age between 1997 and 2007. 

The clothing and, more generally, lifestyle brands launched by celebrities are almost a convention in the USA, where every successful singer has launched lines of beauty, perfumes, spirits and clothes. All these commercial enterprises are often successful, thanks of course to the celebrity-generated traction that puts their face on their products. The only structural problem of such brands is a lack of organic traction: in short, having lost the support of celebrity, the brand tends to lose its very reason for being. The main challenge for the Abercrombie & Fitch group, therefore, will be to harness the media power of the Amelio sisters but also to create a business model that goes beyond immediate social success and can, one day, support itself on its own legs. In fact, in recent times there have been cases of having very successful beauty brands that, after controversies or scandals involving their sponsors, have received heavy economic damage: when influencer James Charles was accused of harassment, for example, it was his partner Morphe who was boycotted and the same happened to Danielle Bernstein and his brand WeWoreWhat, so tied to the popularity of its founder (and accused of plagiarism) that it ended up in bad shape at the first sign of online controversy.