Balmain x H&M: How I Got All The Photos You Couldn’t Wait to See

On Tuesday, October 5, 2015 I unlocked my private Instagram account (followed by ~30) and posted 99 images of a yet-to-be released designer collaboration: Balmain x H&M.

You won’t believe what happened next. (Exactly what you’d expect.)

Part One

I should back up. Anyone who knows me knows I have a shopping…issue. Specifically, I love a good designer collaboration (Hi, Target!). H&M’s collaborations are usually a bit too pricey for my budget (I’m Nordstrom Rack, not Neiman’s) but some friends are particularly excited for Balmain’s entry into the “fast-fashion” market.

Prior to 2014’s Isabel Marant pour H&M launch, I pulled together an album of international press (pre-lookbook) to share, and I set out to do the same for Balmain. Armed with the knowledge of editorial calendar inner workings, I knew images would start appearing soon.

After culling Instagram for new shots, I headed to Google images. The results were saturated with the hero shots of Gigi Hadid, Kendall Jenner and Jourdan Dunn, and I was getting nowhere fast finding images from non-U.S. publications. Back to Google’s web search.

Here’s what happened in all its non-technical glory.

Although I feel like I have a high-level of Google-fu thanks to more than a decade of reporting experience, I’m certainly no Snowden.

I typed in “balmain h&m” and set Search Tools to “Past 24 hours.”

Seriously. That’s it.

Are you telling me you wouldn’t click this? Image from 10.08.15.

At the time, the magic page came up third. It’s considerably more buried now, but it’s still indexed.

Go find it for yourself!

Today the page loads blank, but on the 5th it was the complete lookbook based around the layout of the Paris Metro system — a clever tie-in to the subway-based promotional shots that H&M has already supplied.

And if you spend as much time as I do looking for patterns in URLs, you might also note what’s unusual here. Do you see it?

The subdomain is www2.

See, this is a Chinese page (en_cn = English for China). Www2 is a commonly used mirror for sites being accessed from China, necessary for an international brand like H&M, but easily forgettable by a web dev when all other e-commerce enabled sites use the normal www prefix.

Here is is in broader context. Image from 10.08.15 after the images were posted. That Belgian publication above was pretty excited. Wow!

I know you’re disappointed it wasn’t more like this:

So I right-clicked saved all those beautiful photos and thought, hey, why not do a social experiment via Instagram called “How many likes and comments can I get on these photos.” Using only hashtags for text, I unlocked my hardly used account and uploaded everything I saw; most images that night but the remaining photos the following afternoon.

And then I waited.

Up next: The media catches on.