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When CEO and creative director Marie-Louise Sciò joined Pellicano Hotels Group in 2005, hotels were siloed places. “There wasn’t fashion, there wasn’t music,” she says. “It was quite an isolated world. If you went into a hotel gift shop 20 years ago, they always sold the same things.”
How times have changed. Fashion and hospitality have become intertwined, with a niche set of hotels now evolving into true luxury brands.
Fashion-friendly destinations — such as Palm Heights Grand Cayman (PHGC), Il Pellicano and The Standard — have adopted a collaborative approach to differentiate and boost their appeal, and to attract the luxury set. The word is spread by social media and by fashion journalists, designers and A-list celebs who holiday at these hotspots. And, like all luxury brands, the hotels are steered by their own creative directors.
Gabriella Khalil, founder and creative director of Palm Heights, says the brand evolved organically. “But, we didn’t approach the hotel as ‘just’ a hotel. We approached it in a more culturally driven way, focused on collaborations across the board. And fashion always played a big part in that.”
Pellicano’s Sciò agrees. “Hotels have become lifestyle brands,” she says. “You follow [a brand] because you like the designer and the values. Every brand has its tribe of people who love it and resonate with it. Hotels are the same, they’re finally opening up.”
Branded hospitality is highlighted as a key direction for the travel and hospitality sector by The Future Laboratory, a strategic foresight consultancy. “It’s a trend that is very much on our radar,” says Marta Indeka, senior foresight analyst. “This has a huge impact not only on travel and hospitality, but also on many segments of the luxury industry. Consumers are stretching frontiers of engagement and loyalty — they seek a connection and immersion into a brand universe.”
Fashion and luxury are a logical pairing, says Amber Asher, CEO of Standard International. “Fashion and travel are more alike than most think,” she says. “Both evoke feelings of discovery, creativity and escape. Designers often cite their recent travel as the inspiration behind the design of their collections. As destination travel continues to rise, I believe travellers will be looking to their hotels to provide opportunities to discover and connect with global designers and fashion trends.”
Many of the hotels that achieve this level of branding are smaller-scale — for good reason. “It needs to feel authentic and real to resonate with savvy consumers,” The Future Laboratory’s Indeka says. “This is easier to achieve with smaller and somewhat niche establishments as these collabs have a sought-after ‘if you know, you know’ appeal to them.”
Palm Heights is a standalone property. Italy’s Pellicano Hotels Group currently has three locations, with a further five to seven planned throughout Italy following a €200 million investment from Aermont Capital in August.
Can a hotel brand maintain a niche, luxury appeal as it expands? The Standard, which currently has seven properties, believes so — as long as it’s done slowly and precisely. “Our team immerses themselves in the local culture of every destination,” Asher says. “This dedication to honouring the local culture and collaborating with the emerging talent within each region allows us to maintain our distinctive point of view while expanding our brand globally.”
Indeka of The Future Laboratory cautions against any shift towards the mainstream. Sciò of Pellicano is acutely aware of this. “There are so many big groups, there s so much homogeneity. Globalisation is fabulous, but it flattens a bit, right?”
The right crowd
At Palm Heights, designers become collaborators as well as guests. Luar designer Raul Lopez, who served as a creative consultant, rode out the pandemic there. Bode designer Emily Adams Bode Aujla created the hotel uniforms and upcycled Palm Heights’s old beach towels into jackets. The hotel has carried designer Rosie Assoulin’s distinctive orange-coloured Vivanterre wine since it launched. “There’s always a really interesting overlap,” Khalil says. “Between passion for cuisine, culinary fashion, art, aesthetics — all of these.”
It’s natural for hotels to tap the fashion set, according to Indeka. “The fashion crowd organically became a target audience for hotels — they travel a lot, have large followings and can use aesthetic hotel grounds as backdrop for shoots,” she says. “It’s a match made in heaven.”
The Standard regularly offers up its spaces to fashion insiders for talks and show afterparties, and collaborates with designers on uniforms and retail offerings. At The Standard in London, designers Chet Lo and Harris Reed participated in an artist-in-residence programme that included free studio space. “We’re honoured to play a small part in amplifying the work of talented young designers,” Asher says.
The marketing potential of these partnerships is clear enough, but hotels prefer not to overstate it. Word-of-mouth recommendations and viral social media are considered more helpful for appealing to potential fashion-forward guests. An endorsement from a fashion journalist or stylish celeb can carry more weight than that of a travel writer or travel influencer: “It doesn’t seem staged or transactional,” Indeka says. “That’s a very important aspect for authenticity-obsessed watchful eyes on social media.”
The elevation of merch
Hotels are embracing merch in new, inventive ways that seek to elevate the concept through glitzy collaborations. In July, Christopher John Rogers debuted an exclusive $350 sarong design with Palm Heights. “We thought we could do something special, part for the launch, part celebration of him as a designer being at our [new concept] store,” Khalil says. The collab kicked off with a weekender party attended by the likes of Vogue’s Naomi Elizee and Ditoma designer Rachel Scott (also stocked at the boutique).
“I love Palm Heights’s inclination for worldbuilding through the lens of hospitality,” Rogers says. “When [concept store] Dolores opened this year, it was very natural for CJR and PHGC to begin working together, and we wanted to commemorate the beginning of our partnership with an iconic, exclusive item.”
For Pellicano’s Sciò, a great collaboration is not simply transactional. Pellicano collabs are borne out of Sciò’s personal love of fashion. Il Pellicano partnered with Birkenstock in 2019. “I always wear Birkenstocks around Il Pellicano, and I wanted an elevated version of them,” she says. Likewise, this summer’s collaboration with shoe brand Scholl connected personally with her – “Every time you see them, you think, they remind me of my aunt, my grandmother.”
Rethinking in-house retail
Hotel boutiques are also moving beyond a somewhat predictable focus on resort products. Pellicano Group’s Issimo boutique is both a store and online extension of the hotel’s physical presence; a place to house its projects and collaborations. Part-travel blog, part-e-commerce, the website offers insight into Italy from Sciò’s perspective. “Hotels are a little world,” she explains. “So, why not bring it all into one platform?”
Palm Heights’s concept store Dolores opens in September. Like Issimo, it’s home to the hotel’s cross-industry projects. The goal is to spotlight Caribbean diaspora designers including Diotima, Theophilio and Wales Bonner. “We don’t just want it to be resort from wherever,” Palm Heights’s Khalil says. “I wanted to make sure there was a focus on regional designers who are making incredible pieces.”
For the store design, Khalil collaborated with fashion writer and consultant Marjon Carlos. “She’s helped to curate certain brands and made some really great introductions,” says Khalil. That led to the CJR sarong collaboration. “We’d done a lot of these collaborations in the past, but this was the first time we were really able to ground it in a retail environment,” she adds.
Hotel spaces can also be used for pop-up retail. During the upcoming New York Fashion Week, The Standard, High Line will display the work of 20 BIPOC independent designers, following a connection by Asher with Felita Harris, board member of Raisefashion, founded to help BIPOC-owned businesses and people break into the industry. “We’re passionate about dedicating our spaces to support the arts and to act as a platform for positive change, emerging talent and diversity,” says Asher.
The connection with fashion — as well as art, food, design and local culture — keeps guests coming back, says Khalil of Palm Heights. “It creates such a depth to the experience. And there’s a longevity to that.”
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