This month has been hugely significant for collaborations as two huge retailers, H&M and M&S dropped long awaited collaborations with Kenzo and Alexa Chung respectively. I've been really excited to see and shop from both collections, as snippets and behind-the-scene clips have been released all year round in the run-up.
When the second Archive by Alexa collection was released I was late to the site so missed the first opportunity to by the skirt which I had chosen pre-meditatively. The exclusivity of the items and dispatch of only small orders at a time from the site only increased my desire to purchase the skirt the next time it became available. I went to great lengths to try to find the skirt by visiting the M&S store, somewhere I wouldn't generally go with the intention of making a purchase. I was disappointed to find very limited numbers of stock in-store and came away empty handed but this lead me to check the website religiously until the day finally came when my size was restocked! 
When it came to the H&M x Kenzo collaboration, I was much more prepared. It released at 9am and I was sat ready-and-waiting early at university with the website up and running on my laptop and the mobile app downloaded onto my iPhone. The website crashed and there were numerous complaints on Twitter about the fact that it was so hard to get onto the site, with only a small amount of users allowed on at a time. About an hour and a half later, I finally managed to access the website via the app and purchased an item which was again, bought pre-meditatively.
From my personal experience, I found that I am willing to pay a lot more than I usually would for an item which is promoted as being more exclusive than an ordinary piece. The fact that only a small number of the item are made, comparatively, makes the item much more desirable to me. I think that the concept of high street/designer collaborations is very powerful and effective, as I felt so accomplished by buying into the HM x Kenzo collection.
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