Gap Signed A Boy Band To Save The Jeans

Gap Inc. announced Tuesday a multiyear partnership with JYT, a five-member boy band, as the first deal under its new Fashiontainment platform, per AP via Seattle Times. The deal includes a co-produced docuseries, a national mall tour starting in October, and a capsule collection co-designed by the band.

A jeans store is now a record label. That is the entire headline. Gap Inc. made the eighteen dollar plain T-shirt a cultural event, and its fix for struggling jeans is to sign a boy band, film a docuseries about the band, dress the band, tour the band through its own stores, and sell the band. The band is the ad. The ad is the band. The mall is the venue.

The CEO running this is the guy who fixed Barbie at Mattel, and his fix for denim was to hire a chief entertainment officer, open a Los Angeles office, and invent a platform called Fashiontainment. WWD ran the deal details, and the details are a boy band. It is a pizzeria hiring its own rock band so the pizza tastes real. Except the band is real, the jeans are twenty bucks, and the pizzeria now owns the band's autographs.

The five members are teenagers, developed by a Grammy-nominated producer as the world's next global sensation, and a Republic Records exec already calls JYT one of this year's biggest breakouts. The group has 450 million views in 90 days and a multiyear contract with a denim company, and in the fall its members will co-design a collection you can buy on gap.com. That is not a partnership. That is a SKU with a stage name, and the stage name comes from the press release, which decided so.

The docuseries, per the company, will "capture their personalities and aspects of their personal relationships." A retail company now owns the inside of a boy band's feelings. The nineties boy bands were a fad. Gap has decided to own the fad and put it in a capsule.

YOUR TURN: The Gap Kids capsule drops this fall. Buy it, or is that the exact moment you stop buying Gap?