Madonna goes high street

Madonna has confirmed she and her dancers will wear H&M off-stage for the remainder of her sold-out tour “Confessions” world tour. In addition to wearing the Swedish high street designs, Madonna has collaborated on a “specially designed Madonna tracksuit” that will be sold in H&M stores starting in mid-August. The singer and her dancers will star in an advertising campaign that is scheduled to break in August. It is not yet known who will be the photographer of the campaign.

“Partnering with H&M feels like a perfect fit,” Madonna said in a statement. “We’ll all get to express ourselves in our own individual ways. The dancers and I are excited to go shopping together.” The tie-up is the latest of H&M’s high-profile associations aimed to generate buzz and elevate the firm’s image for inexpensive, trendy clothes to higher levels of creativity. In the last two years, H&M has worked with Karl Lagerfeld and Stella McCartney on popular one-off fashion collections that brought droves of shoppers into the stores.

Perpetuating that strategy, Dutch designers Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren, two of fashion’s most conceptual minds, were hired to design a collection that will be introduced in H&M stores this fall.

Working with a celebrity of Madonna’s caliber signals that H&M is willing to take its strategy for publicity-generating ploys into new territory.

“This is a thrill for H&M,” the retailer’s head of design, Margareta van den Bosch, said in a statement. “Aside from being great fans of Madonna’s music and fashion sense, we admire her ability to always be ahead of the trends in everything she does. We look forward to seeing how her touring family translates H&M’s seasonal trends to their own personal looks.”