From Bad Bunny’s Calvins to A’ja Wilson’s sneakers, these fashion brands shone in 2025

Whether talking about underwear brands hand-selecting the perfect models to break the internet or the endless wooing of Gen Z and its style sensibilities, there was no shortage of creativity among the fashion brands that set the trends over the past year.

Here are the 2025 Brands That Matter honorees in the fashion space that innovated on how style showed up for consumers in the past year.

Bogg Bag

When the function of a tote bag meets the versatility and kitschy-cute style of Crocs, the possibilities are endless. So proves Bogg Bag, a brand that’s constantly riffing to create collector’s items and limited-time variants of its signature design by switching up the bags’ colors, their patterns, and even the shapes of their cutouts. In late 2024, one of the brand’s most popular variants launched: a Bogg Bag sold only at Target emblazoned with the store’s bull’s-eye logo. The Target bag, which had 82% of its sales come from new Bogg shoppers, was just one of several retailer-exclusive designs launched in the past year. Bogg’s collaborations didn’t stop there: The brand also partnered with Fanatics to launch a line of sports-inspired bags featuring the logos and colors of 33 popular NFL and college teams. Most recently, Bogg released a new version designed to make the tote more upscale.

Calvin Klein

Few brands have the power to break the internet like Calvin Klein does. The underwear brand’s choice of models certainly has something to do with it—in the past year, celebrities like Jeremy Allen White and Bad Bunny in nothing but tighty-whities had fans flocking to take pictures with their billboards—but it’s the Calvin Klein lens that creates viral moment after viral moment. It all translates to massive media impact value for the brand, which reports that White’s campaign generated more than $12 million in media value in its first 48 hours and drove upwards of 30% growth in Calvin Klein’s underwear sales in the U.S. alone within its first week. That success was surpassed by Bad Bunny, whose underwear campaign earned $15 million in media impact value and drove a 25% increase in sales of the brand’s core styles.

Coach

Coach is courting Gen Z from every angle. The luxury fashion brand is proving that despite its high price tags, it’s not totally (or even remotely) out of touch. Through ethnographic research and in-person engagements, Coach has placed its finger firmly on the pulse: The brand’s collaboration with the WNBA demonstrates a savvy for what’s hot in sports. Its Coachtopia sub-brand appeals to Gen Z’s environmental concerns with a focus on circularity and upcycled materials, even putting consumers in the driver’s seat with the Coachtopia Beta Community, a network of Gen Zers who provide feedback and their own ideas for Coachtopia products. Next, the brand is also branching out into hospitality with the launch of Coach Coffee Shops, where Coach is less an aesthetic and more an experience. Already popular internationally, the brand has opened four of the coffee shops in the U.S., featuring bags with the coffee shop logo, an anthropomorphic coffee mug named Miss Jo.

Gap

Read about how Gap is using celeb partnerships to make its denim a go-to for Gen Z—one viral dance at a time.

H&M

In 2024, Charli xcx was the zeitgeist incarnate—and at her peak of popularity, she was wearing H&M. The fashion retailer understands how to make its target customer pay attention, with artists including Troye Sivan, Caroline Polachek, Arca, Offset, and Kaytranada all performing at H&M events in 2024 alone. Charli, meanwhile, was the campaign star of H&M’s AW2024 collection, which she capped off with a surprise concert in New York City’s Times Square. Her star power translated to her fans’ purchasing power, with a coat Charli wore in one of the campaign images selling out in most markets within days of launch. In 2025, H&M kept its music momentum going with its H&M&LA Festival, a celebration of the brand’s spring/summer 2025 collection featuring performances from still more of-the-moment artists like Doechii and PinkPantheress. Even after its major investments in brand-building initiatives and product offering, H&M achieved an increase in full-year profits in 2024—music to any retailer’s ears.

Levi’s

Beyoncé. Need we say more? Probably not, but here goes nothing. Levi’s has maintained its place as the world’s leading denim brand, seizing every opportunity to remind the world that when they think jeans, they’re probably thinking Levi’s. That meant jumping at the chance to embrace Beyoncé’s re-spelling of its brand name as “Levii’s” on Cowboy Carter, temporarily using the new spelling for its socials (and, naturally, going mega viral). It also meant developing a full campaign with Beyoncé that lasted into summer 2025 and was so successful that Levi’s dubbed its decade-high 8% holiday growth in 2024 “the Beyoncé effect.” Beyond all things Queen Bey, Levi’s also collaborated with the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, helping to costume the film and highlighting the brand’s place in the legacy of music history.

New Balance

From celebrity collabs to high fashion, New Balance can do it all. The sneaker brand has successfully positioned itself as a cultural catch-all, able to blend its aesthetic seamlessly with anyone and everyone: athletes like the 2025 Naismith College Player of the Year Cooper Flagg, artists like Jack Harlow, and fashion brands like Ganni, each bringing their own audiences to New Balance’s storefronts. The brand’s extensive collabs with tennis superstar Coco Gauff reached new heights when fashion house Miu Miu also entered the mix, creating a collection for Gauff to wear at several tournaments this summer. New Balance’s chameleon-like collaborations have enabled the brand to keep growing at a remarkable pace: 20% year over year for the past four years.

Nike

Nike knows women’s sports aren’t the future, they’re the present—and its campaigns over the past year make that crystal clear. Its “So Win” anthem premiered during Super Bowl LIX, celebrating icons of women’s sports who dominate in their field, like Sabrina Ionescu and Jordan Chiles. Its Breaking4 moonshot this summer ensured all eyes were on Faith Kipyegon during her historic attempt to become the first woman to run a sub-four-minute mile. Its A’One collection, a collaboration with A’ja Wilson, encourages young athletes to see themselves in her journey and dream just as big. And beyond products and campaigns, Nike puts its money where its mouth is, supporting access to sports through global initiatives like Play Academy with Naomi Osaka, which aims to increase girls’ participation in sports in Japan, Haiti, and Los Angeles.

Savage x Fenty

Savage x Fenty not only taps into pop culture, it creates it, unconcerned with what the world has to say. Take the lingerie brand’s Valentine’s Day campaign for 2025, “Love Your Way.” Featuring Love Island winners Serena Page and Kordell Beckham, TikTok stars Hayley and Jules LeBlanc, and the founder and icon herself, Rihanna, the campaign was a must-watch for every internet native. But it also broke from the mold, redefining the kinds of love we ought to celebrate on Valentine’s, highlighting self-love, friendship, and sisterhood alongside romance, and all without any caveats about gender or orientation. The campaign got the world talking, sparking more than 100 editorial features and reaching over a billion unique monthly visitors. Just a month later, Savage x Fenty did it again, announcing Grammy-nominated artist GloRilla as the first-ever exclusive ambassador for all four of Rihanna’s Fenty brands. The announcement and accompanying campaign again set the internet ablaze, this time with more than 2 billion unique monthly visitors and nearly 60 digital stories.

Skims

It’s impossible to deny the cultural staying power of Skims. Everywhere we’ve looked for the past year, there it was, on Team USA athletes at the Olympics, on Charli xcx at the height of Brat summer. . . Then there was the brand’s heartfelt campaign with Olivia Munn, who in fall 2024 shared her journey with breast cancer and recontextualized the purpose of Skims’s controversial Ultimate Nipple Bra, which—though designed to be a statement in reclamation of women’s bodies—proved an unexpected source of comfort and confidence for women who had undergone mastectomies. In 2025, Skims also released the first collection from NikeSkims, a new stand-alone brand combining Nike’s athletic expertise with Skims’s shapewear sensibilities. Through it all, Skims maintains its commitment to inclusive sizing and shades, a testament to its slogan of providing “solutions for every body.”

True Religion

Twenty-three years after its founding, True Religion is back with a vengeance (and just in time for the Y2K renaissance). The iconic denim brand of the early aughts is now more profitable than ever—it generated more than $370 million in revenue in 2024, a massive jump from $280 million the year before. The key to its comeback? The right celebrity collaborations at just the right times. That includes a multiplatform campaign starring Anitta, performances from YG and Sexyy Red at Rolling Loud, and a set from Megan Thee Stallion at Coachella 2025, where she and all her dancers wore head-to-toe True Religion. Along the way, the brand launched its “Own Your True” campaign, encouraging consumers to boldly be themselves. 

Urban Outfitters

To corner the market on Gen Z, you have to meet them where they are. In 2024, Urban Outfitters took that advice literally, transforming four of their stores in college towns during move-in to create one-of-a-kind concert experiences for students. These pop-up events, called UO Live On Campus, featured trending artists including Tinashe, Towa Bird, Quavo, and The Marías. The campaign also included the launch of 20 pop-up shops featuring curated college essentials, helping students make the transition from high school to college. Altogether, the campaign generated more than 1.2 billion PR impressions, 2.7 million social impressions, and over a thousand in-person attendees. Urban Outfitters has kept the college-themed campaigns coming: This spring, it launched UO Haul, an experience in New York City where participants competed to find “Gen Z dorm rooms” on glass-walled trucks around the city, with the chance to unlock them and win tickets to an exclusive Katseye concert. And this past summer, the retailer launched UO Haul: Special Delivery, sending surprise care packages to incoming college freshmen across America.

This story is part of Fast Company’s 2025 Brands That Matter. Explore the full list of honorees that have demonstrated a commitment to their brand’s purpose and cultural relevance to their audience. Read more about the methodology behind the selection process.

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