The retailer’s new boy band deal raises a question every brand in the culture business will eventually have to answer: when you help write an artist’s story, what do you owe them?
On August 19, 2025, Gap released a denim commercial that did something most brand campaigns only claim to do. It entered the culture on its own momentum. The spot showed the six members of KATSEYE, a young global girl group, moving through sharp choreography to a reworked version of Kelis’ 2003 hit “Milkshake,” re-recorded with Kelis’ involvement, and the internet responded the way it does when it decides something belongs to it. Fans posted some 250,000 of their own versions of the dance. When Gap reported earnings that November, CEO Richard Dickson told investors the campaign had generated more than 8 billion impressions and 500 million views, driven double-digit growth in denim, and helped make Gap the No. 6 adult denim brand in the United States, up two spots from the year before. In that quarter, Gap brand comparable sales rose 7 percent. Quarterly sales have many parents, and no single commercial can claim the whole number. Still, by almost any measure a marketing department uses, it was a triumph.
Campaign reference: Gap’s “Better in Denim” announcement identifies KATSEYE, Kelis’s “Milkshake,” and the creative team behind the August 19, 2025 campaign. Watch “Better in Denim” on YouTube (opens on YouTube).
But one number from that season deserves more attention than it received. In the week after the ad debuted, U.S. streams of “Milkshake” rose 179 percent, according to Luminate. Kelis, to be clear, deserved every one of them. The song is a classic, and there is something pleasing about a new generation discovering it. Still, it is worth noticing where the lift went. Gap hired a music group, built a campaign around that group, and the song that climbed was someone else’s. Gap’s own announcement described the campaign as “spotlighting global talent and celebrating self-expression through music, dance, and denim.” In the commercial itself, the voice millions of people heard belonged to an artist who was not on screen.
To be fair, Gap did not ignore KATSEYE’s music. That same announcement promoted the group’s EP, Beautiful Chaos, and its fall tour, and Gap sold a KATSEYE logo hoodie alongside the campaign. I raise the soundtrack not to scold Gap. I have spent my career in branding and marketing, and I know that creative decisions often have reasons invisible from the outside. Perhaps “Milkshake” fit the Y2K nostalgia Gap was cultivating. Perhaps the licensing, the timing, or the choreography made it the obvious choice. But partnerships communicate through their details, and this detail says something specific. When the centerpiece of a partnership with musicians runs on someone else’s song, it presents them first as dancers and faces. For the length of that commercial, Gap hired the image and left the artist’s own music at home.
That distinction might have stayed a footnote. It matters now because of what Gap did next.
What Gap bought, and why it worked
Before questioning the strategy, it is fair to admit that it is a good one. The logic behind cultural partnerships is sound, and it is getting sounder. A product can be copied by a competitor within a season. A campaign can be imitated. A discount can be matched by anyone willing to take the margin hit. What cannot be easily replicated is the thing an artist brings with them: a community that has already formed around shared tastes, emotions, and identity. A brand that enters that community is not interrupting a conversation. It is joining one people already care about.
Gap’s results suggest the brand understands this better than most of its own corporate siblings. In the quarter that ended August 1, 2026, the most recent one Gap Inc. has reported, the parent company’s comparable sales fell 1 percent. Old Navy fell 4 percent and Athleta fell 12 percent, while the Gap brand rose 10 percent, a performance the company attributed to its focus on “big ideas and culturally relevant storytelling.” Dickson had already described the KATSEYE campaign as “the power of the playbook in action,” and Gap has plainly decided to keep running that playbook. While its sister brands struggled, a legacy retailer found a way to make itself interesting to people who were not alive during its last golden age. That is not nothing.
The trouble is that relevance does not behave like an asset you can buy outright. It behaves more like a reputation. One party earns it, and anyone standing nearby can only borrow it, provisionally, for as long as the audience believes the arrangement is fair. Audiences tend to notice when that arrangement has tilted. They may not articulate it, but over time they sense the difference between a brand that showed up for an artist and a brand that showed up for the artist’s followers.
From sponsor to producer
On September 22 of this year, Gap took the next step. Gap Inc. announced a multi-year partnership with Just Your Type, a five-member American boy band known as JYT. It is the first collaboration under the company’s new Fashiontainment platform, which Gap says is meant to “create content, licensing, partnerships and experiences that build fandom.” The deal is more ambitious than a campaign. Gap will co-produce a multi-episode docuseries following the band behind the scenes, and in October the group begins a national mall tour with live performances and in-store activations at select Gap locations. The band’s members will co-design a capsule collection, and Gap will dress them for select performances. The effort is overseen by Pam Kaufman, Gap Inc.’s Chief Entertainment Officer, who leads the company’s newly created Entertainment division.
“Together, we can create something much bigger than a campaign.”
Pam Kaufman, Chief Entertainment Officer, Gap Inc.’s JYT partnership announcement, September 22, 2026
A clothing company now has a Chief Entertainment Officer. Sit with that for a moment, and then add one more detail: the members of JYT are all teenagers.
This is a different kind of relationship than the one Gap had with KATSEYE. In 2025, Gap rented a cultural moment. In 2026, it is helping to build one. It is co-producing the band’s story, staging its performances in its stores, and dressing its members for the stage. Kaufman described the goal as “something much bigger than a campaign,” and she is right. When a brand moves from sponsoring culture to producing it, the question of whether it is borrowing or building no longer applies. It is building. The only question left is what, and for whom.
There is an obvious objection here, and it deserves an honest answer. Neither of these groups grew up in a garage. KATSEYE was formed through the 2023 competition series Dream Academy, a collaboration between HYBE and Geffen Records, and its formation was chronicled in the Netflix docuseries Pop Star Academy: KATSEYE. I enjoyed that series, and I came away more interested in how the members were developed than in any single performance. In its first episode, HYBE chairman Bang Si-hyuk explains why he evaluates trainees through a screen: “Most people become fans when they’re watching content such as music videos or shows.” JYT was developed by Grammy-nominated songwriter and producer Freddy Wexler, trained for a year in Los Angeles with choreographer Nick DeMoura, and is signed to Wexler Records and Republic Records. Wexler insists JYT “isn’t a manufactured boyband” because its members “chose each other,” and that may well be true. Even so, the talent in both cases is shaped from the beginning to be experienced as content. A skeptic could reasonably say there is little untouched culture here for Gap to borrow. Much of it was engineered before Gap arrived.
The skeptic has a point, and it matters less than it seems. Pop music has always been manufactured to some degree. Motown famously ran an in-house finishing school, where Maxine Powell coached artists including the Supremes on poise and presentation, and few people think less of the Supremes for it. The meaningful line was never between organic and manufactured. It runs between manufacturing that serves the artists and manufacturing that serves only the product. That line is exactly where Gap now stands, because Gap is no longer outside the factory. It has a seat on the assembly line.
The documentary is the test
If you want to know what kind of partner Gap intends to be, watch the docuseries. According to the announcement, it will give audiences “an inside look at the band’s journey, personalities, relationships and creative work.” That description could fit two very different films.
The first is familiar. It follows the arc every music documentary follows: the long rehearsals, the self-doubt, the breakthrough performance, the tearful group hug, and somewhere in the background, a rack of capsule collection hoodies waiting under good lighting. It is a highlight reel with a narrative spine. It will perform well, and it will be forgotten by the time the next group arrives.
The second film would be harder to make and far more valuable. It would treat the documentary as a tool for education rather than promotion. Imagine established musicians sitting down with five teenagers and explaining what they wish someone had told them at seventeen: how to read a contract, who owns a master recording and why that matters, what happens to your sense of self when a few million strangers decide they know you, and how to protect your health when the schedule is designed to consume it. Those lessons are rarely available to young artists before they need them. Most learn them the expensive way, after the contracts are signed. Not all of that help belongs on camera, either. The most personal support, especially anything touching mental health, should happen privately, and no teenager should have to turn a hard week into an episode to receive it.
Gap would not be starting from zero. Earlier this month it highlighted Future Creators with the Fashion Institute of Technology and The Brotherhood Sister Sol, a six-week program in which 50 New York City high school students studied design, fine art, and photography with mentorship from Gap designers. The instinct is already in the building. A company with Gap’s resources and distribution could extend it to the performers it now helps produce, not only for JYT but for every young artist watching at home and wondering whether to try. Then the story Gap tells stops being “look at this group we partnered with” and becomes “we want the next generation of artists to make it through this industry intact.” The second story is not only more generous. It is a stronger brand position, because it gives the audience a reason to trust Gap that has nothing to do with denim.
The documentary is also where Gap’s role as producer becomes literal. As a co-producer, Gap will have a hand in shaping the story of five teenagers during the most formative years of their careers. The announcement does not say who holds final cut, and it says little about what protections come with the deal. That silence does not mean none exist. It means the public cannot yet judge them. Either way, a seat in the editing room is real power, and it carries real responsibility, whether or not the contract spells it out.
The executive reality
None of this means the business question goes away. Eventually someone in a quarterly review will ask how the docuseries and the mall tour are moving product, and they should ask. I have never believed marketing can exist separately from business results, and every good partnership idea I have championed still had to earn its approval on commercial terms. Gap has said plainly that it expects Fashiontainment to increase sales and loyalty to its own brands while also elevating the talent it partners with. Both halves of that sentence are legitimate goals. The problem is that most companies pursue them in the wrong order.
The usual sequence starts with the product. How do we put the artist’s name on something? What does the merchandise look like? How quickly can we convert attention into transactions? Those are not bad questions. They are premature ones. When a relationship is real, the product arrives carrying meaning the brand could never have manufactured on its own. When the relationship is thin, the product is just a shirt with a name on it, and fans usually notice. The difference between a collaboration people remember and one that ends up on a clearance rack is rarely the product. It is what the product represents.
The same principle applies inside the building. A company that tells the world it champions creativity and self-expression almost certainly employs thousands of people with creative lives it may never have asked about: musicians, painters, designers, people working toward something that has nothing to do with their job title. A brand that celebrates artists on billboards and ignores the ones in its own offices is making a claim it has not tested. I have always believed that helping someone reach a dream is a success for a leader, even when the dream eventually takes that person somewhere else. Values that only apply to people who help sell product are not values. They are positioning.
Sponsorship or stewardship
Gap has earned the right to be taken seriously in culture. The KATSEYE campaign worked, the Gap brand is growing while its parent company struggles, and the JYT partnership is a genuinely interesting bet on the idea that fandom can be built rather than bought. Plenty of brands would kill to have Gap’s problem.
But the move from sponsor to producer changes the scorecard. A sponsor measures what the artist did for the brand: impressions, views, comparable sales, rank among denim labels. A steward measures what the brand did for the artist: whether their music got heard, whether they learned what they needed to know, whether they are better off at the end of a multi-year deal than they were at the beginning. The first scorecard is easier to keep. The second is the one audiences quietly keep for you.
Sometime in the next year or two, Gap will make another denim commercial. This time it will have a boy band under contract, a documentary crew on set, and a Chief Entertainment Officer weighing in on the music. The test of whether Gap is building culture or merely renting it will be surprisingly simple. Listen to whose song is playing.