“Which brand do you think will sign Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams?” Has been the most popular question in my inbox, coming from high-powered executives, die-hard fashion fanatics, and casual readers alike. The mega-viral Heated Rivalry stars have taken our newsfeeds by storm, and it’s only natural that fashion will come for a hefty piece of this potentially very lucrative pie. This query, really, boils down to a simple question: Will Storrie and Williams sign on to become brand ambassadors? And if they do, what does that even mean?
In the days before the internet turned red carpets into something of a content circus, celebrities would just wear a thing. Think of, say, Julia Roberts attending the 1997 Golden Globe Awards in an Armani men’s suit she bought herself at a store.
If in the jetset disco era of Halston and his “Halstonettes”—which included Liza Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor, and Bianca Jagger—the idea of a designer befriending a celebrity meant nothing other than them having a muse, a shift came in the ’90s, when designers like Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs, Gianni Versace and his sister Donatella started to become stars in their own right. Wearing a label then started to mean more: fame, access, clout.
Now those relationships have become more formal and corporate, with the added layer of becoming transactional. In most cases, these deals are negotiated by managers and lawyers and publicists, and outlined carefully in iron-clad contracts. Sure, celebrities can still be muses to designers, and often they still are, but they now also have a different label: “brand ambassador.”
Plainly, in the context of luxury fashion and celebrity today, a brand ambassador is someone who has been contracted to promote a label—be that by fronting campaigns, wearing its product, attending events like dinners, store openings, and fashion shows, or even partnering on a capsule or collection. The reason why this happens is straightforward enough: Celebrities, particularly today in the age of social media, can reach audiences in more organic ways than the companies can themselves. A picture is worth a thousand words, particularly when it comes with a fashion credit in a photo caption or a quick Instagram tag.
In the mid-2010s, with the rise of Instagram, kind of online exposure began to be measured and quantified, too. The fashion industry has started to calculate EMV, or earned media value, to represent the monetary value of media exposure which has not been paid for—like organic social posts, influencer and celebrity mentions, press coverage, and more. Simply, by measuring impressions and engagement, EMV estimates what a brand would have paid for equivalent advertising.
To go back to Storrie and Williams, their appearances at talk shows, junkets, or at the 2026 Golden Globes (where they wore Saint Laurent and Giorgio Armani, respectively) has a certain value to brands. The AI-powered data software Launchmetrics, which collates data around the fashion industry, has its own metric called Media Impact Value (MIV), which assigns monetary value to marketing strategies in order to calculate an estimated return on investment. An example, Louis Vuitton ambassador Zendaya fronted a campaign for the brand’s latest collaboration with the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami in December 2024. Launchmetrics calculated that its MIV a week after its release had been $7.4 million.
Celebrities have a lot to gain from these partnerships, too. And while numbers are rarely (if ever) disclosed, these are very lucrative contracts. Emma Stone’s now longtime contract with Vuitton had been initially reported to land between $6 and $10 million for two years when she first signed with the brand in 2017. Stone is a shining example of a longtime brand ambassador whose role has evolved over time: She started by fronting campaigns, but has since won an Oscars in Vuitton, filmed and recorded a podcast with its designer Nicolas Ghesquière, and covered the September 2025 issue of Vogue in six looks designed for her by the the designer in a story that documented their “real-life friendship.”