INTERVIEW David K Shields
PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHY Henrik Nielsen
There are people who move through the fashion world leaving fingerprints everywhere – on the campaigns, the collaborations, the very architecture of how luxury talks to culture – and then slip out of the spotlight, never announcing their hand. Donald Schneider is one of those people.
You know his work even if you don’t know his name. The first H&M designer collaboration – the one that sold out in hours, the one that changed the industry’s understanding of what aspiration could mean at scale – ‘Karl Lagerfeld and H&M’, that was Donald. So were the partnerships with Balmain, Versace, Maison Margiela, Beyoncé, and Beckham that followed during his tenure as Global Creative Director. The through-line in all of it: a belief that a genuinely good idea doesn’t dilute when it reaches more people. It amplifies.
In Issue 5: Vanguard, we sat down with Donald to talk across the full arc of his career – from his early days in New York nightclubs and the Paris fashion press, through the seismic H&M years, to where he finds himself now: reviving ELHO, the legendary Swiss skiwear label, with the same instincts that have always guided him. Not nostalgia. Not safety. Something closer to translation.
Ambassador Zoe Van Essen for ELHO
“AI can generate, but it can’t yet dream. That’s still our job.”
Donald is clear-eyed about the landscape – the influencer economy, the algorithm’s appetite for volume, the way the concentrated magic of a great magazine has been replaced by the endless scroll. He was in the room the night it shifted, at an Erdem x H&M launch in Los Angeles in 2017, watching journalists give way to influencers who didn’t drink, didn’t mingle, just filmed. He clocked it immediately. And rather than resist, he did what he’s always done: found the creative opportunity inside the disruption.
“True creativity doesn’t fear scale – it shapes it.”
What excites him about ELHO is precisely what excited him about Karl Lagerfeld for H&M two decades ago – the audacity of a collision that shouldn’t work, and does. A 75-year-old brand that invented jet pants and introduced neon to the slopes, now rebuilt around bio-based materials, visionary design, and a refusal to be purely nostalgic. The first collection landed in October 2024 with a Basquiat collaboration; the second brings Paris graffiti artist André Saraiva into the fold. It wears its heritage lightly, and looks forward hard.
Ambassador Zoe Van Essen for ELHO
“We’re not trying to recreate the past – we’re translating it.”
There’s a moment in the conversation where Donald describes Helmut Newton – a man he worked with closely – and the small notepad Newton always carried, filling it with observations from the world around him, never looking back at old reference. The rule: ideas must feel now. It’s as close to a creative manifesto as Donald gets, and it explains everything about how he works. The past is a resource, not a blueprint.
Donald is one of the rare creatives who has operated at both the most rarefied and most accessible ends of the fashion spectrum – and understood, better than almost anyone, that there’s no contradiction there.
Read the full interview with Donald Schneider via the below link. It’s a genuinely rich conversation – about the shift from print to influencer culture, the role of AI in creativity, the importance of originality, and what it means to honour a brand’s legacy while refusing to be defined by it.
Follow ELHO at ELHOfreestyle.com.
Featured in It’s Interval VANGUARD – view full story and more from this issue!