Shifting Up Gears In The Convergence Economy

MARANELLO, ITALY – JUNE 13: A model, fashion detail, walks the runway at the fashion debut of the first co-ed Ferrari collection at Ferrari Factory on June 13, 2021 in Maranello, Italy. (Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)

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When RAYE stepped out in Ferrari Style, a design created over 8 days, by 10 artisans and with over 50,000 elements – the engineering of the dress and the design carried more weight than a typical fashion moment. The singer is one of the defining musical talents of the year, with streams in the hundreds of millions and a creative presence that extends across fashion, storytelling and global culture. Her choices influence how people think and feel. A design from a brand rooted in automotive engineering rather than fashion, at London’s key fashion event, signalled something more fundamental. It reflected the way consumers now move between worlds without hesitation or hierarchy.

Ferrari Style is still a young proposition, launched in 2021 under Rocco Iannone to translate the brand’s design discipline into ready-to-wear. It was conceived not as branded merchandise but as a serious extension of Ferrari’s aesthetic language, proportion, structure, clarity, applied to clothing. It has matured quickly, finding its footing on the Milan schedule and earning more defined reviews with each season. Its emergence matters because it shows how a legacy engineering brand can gain cultural relevance far beyond its original category when the underlying design point of view is strong enough.

People no longer separate their interests into neat sectors. They discover fashion through music, technology through sport, lifestyle through food and luxury through culture. Identity is layered. Influence travels sideways. Brands that remain confined to their original category risk becoming invisible to audiences who no longer think that way.

This is the foundation of what I call the Convergence Economy.

Automotive Innovation & Celebration

In The Grand Prix Effect, I explored how racing transformed from a specialised sport into a cultural meeting point. Attendance at landmark races has doubled across the last decade, and broadcast audiences have risen more than thirty per cent in key markets. People arrive for the racing, but they stay for the fashion, hospitality, technology and shared cultural experience. Motorsport has clearly demonstrated that influence gathers where different worlds meet. Ferrari’s move into fashion sits on the same trajectory. It is not a departure from its identity but an expansion of where that identity can live.

Why Ferrari Style Works While Others Stall

Several automotive houses have ventured into fashion without finding meaningful traction. The challenge might be one of intention. When fashion is treated as merchandise, the result feels disconnected from culture. Ferrari Style works because it begins with the brand’s core values rather than its iconography. The clothing reflects discipline, proportion and Italian design clarity. It does not mimic vehicles or borrow from nostalgia. It stands on its own terms.

New Market Possibilities

The reason this expansion works becomes clearer when we look at how consumers navigate culture. They might find a luxury brand through a musician, a piece of technology through a sports moment or a food concept through fashion and design. Discovery has become non-linear and emotional. Relevance now depends on a brand’s ability to appear consistently across different parts of a consumer’s life. Ferrari’s design values have always been built on proportion, clarity and intention. Under Rocco Iannone, those values translate naturally into fashion, which is why the line feels credible rather than experimental.

Where Cross-Sector Influence Takes Hold

This shift is visible across the cultural landscape. Music and fashion have long influenced one another, recently with Beyoncé’s Renaissance universe altering the trajectory of independent designers and reshaping mainstream luxury. Pharrell’s leadership at Louis Vuitton has expanded the creative director role into cultural interpretation rather than house stewardship. Technology has altered the language of food, an examples being Sweetgreen’s automation which has become a symbol of operational evolution and a talking point far beyond the restaurant industry. These examples demonstrate the same truth. Influence is no longer built by staying inside a category. It is built by having a presence that makes sense across several.

Why This Signals What Comes Next

As we witness more luxury houses moving into food and hospitality, Gucci now runs cafés and Osterias across Asia, Europe and the US, and Ralph Lauren’s restaurants have become destinations in their own right. We see it in hospitality brands moving into beauty and lifestyle, with Soho House and The Standard selling skincare and fragrance with the same confidence as niche brands.

Automotive brands have been making similar moves for years. Porsche Design is a global accessories business. Mercedes-Benz has expanded into interiors. BMW collaborates on furniture and mobility-inspired clothing. In that context, Ferrari stepping into fashion isn’t an anomaly, it is evidence of how the world now works.

Consumers no longer build identity within the borders of single industries. They move easily between gaming, gastronomy, fashion, biotech, technology, luxury and hospitality, and brands are beginning to follow. Some of the clearest signals come from categories that once had little reason to overlap. Food and drink names such as Vita Coco and Chipotle have established footholds inside gaming platforms, creating virtual experiences that have attracted tens of millions of visits and introducing their brands to audiences who may never meet them in traditional settings.

In another direction, bio-textile innovators like Bolt Threads and Spiber have turned laboratory research into new materials for fashion, showing how scientific experimentation can influence luxury and sustainability, even if the technology is still developing at scale. Technology and apparel continue to merge as university labs and streetwear designers trial smart textiles and embedded sensors, hinting at a future in which clothing becomes both expressive and functional.

This is the substance of the Convergence Economy. Influence does not develop inside categories anymore; it develops across them. Brands are learning to operate in adjacent cultural spaces without diluting who they are, because that is where modern attention gathers and where identity is now formed.

Even the most established sectors are adapting. Formula 1’s recent collaboration with Disney, from the “Fuel the Magic” campaign at the Las Vegas Grand Prix to upcoming content and merchandise planned for the 2026 and 2027 seasons, reflects how far convergence has travelled. A global motorsport aligning with a family entertainment giant would once have seemed unlikely; today it is a measured response to audiences who live across multiple cultural worlds. These partnerships alone will not redefine industries, but they illustrate a wider truth: the brands shaping the next decade are the ones that can move across culture with confidence while remaining unmistakably themselves.

RAYE’s choice simply made the moment visible. She sits at the intersection of music, fashion and storytelling, and when she selects a brand with automotive origins, it confirms what the rest of the market is already showing. Influence now moves across worlds, not within them. A brand that can hold its identity steady while appearing in new cultural settings becomes more relevant, not diluted.

What Ferrari Style demonstrates is not a trend but a trajectory. As categories continue to dissolve in the minds of consumers, the next decade of brand building will belong to the companies that understand how to operate with credibility across multiple parts of culture and still feel unmistakably themselves.