More designer/high street Collaborations - but are they any good?

With the news that Preen and Jonathan Saunders are about to team up with Debenhams to produce diffusion lines, and the H&M/Lanvin collaboration only weeks away from hitting the shops, I'm starting to wonder about the worth of buying into collections like this. I've never held a huge fascination with them - they're always wildly over-hyped and the result is always a let down. My love for the Swedish shop H&M cannot be overstated - but with the rock bottom prices I've always accepted that yes, my skirt was only £10, but the material is nothing to write home about, and I WILL see 35 other people on the street wearing the same thing pretty much every day. The opposite is true of buying into luxury fashion. The skirt will cost £400 - but the fabric will be quality, I'm much less likely to see other people wearing the same skirt, and I get to say, when faced with the question "where is it from?", "oh, this, its from [insert name of coveted designer label]'s new autumn collection", and there is definitely a certain satisfaction with that. Now this should make the designer/high street collab formula a dream come true. But its a sad home truth of fashion that much of the experience is an illusion created by the brands themselves. A skirt designed by Karl Lagerfeld hanging in a beautifully designed, uncluttered boutique that has quiet changing rooms, deferential assistants, and satisfyingly big, posh carrier bags that scream "luxury" to the world when you leave clutching one, looks much, much different when its hanging off a plastic hanger in a loud, crowded, messy high street shop that has stock piled up to the ceiling and you're surrounded by school-kids and other harrassed looking people in 20 minute changing room queues where they count your garments for fear of you shoplifting. And is a piece by Lanvin for H&M any more desirable than a normal H&M piece? At those prices it'll be high street fabrics anyway - and possibly even worse than usual because after the expense of selling "designer" pieces for knock off prices they'll have to cut corners somewhere. The designs will still be mass-produced in the same factories in whatever corner of the world the high street emporium in question usually uses, so my guess is that the cut and quality of the stitching ain't gonna be anything more impressive than average. And the designer collaborations are often nothing like the style of the designer collections. Lanvin's collection for H&M (preview above) just looks like a bunch of bog-standard H&M cocktail dresses in boring black. Tuxedo jacket? Yawn. Plus the sunglasses are more Lagerfeld than anything else. Personally, I'll be checking out the Preen line for Debenhams, and I'll certainly have a peek at the Lanvin/H&M offering, but I'm not getting my hopes too high. Some it will probably be nice, but then H&M often does nice things anyway. One that I've heard really good things about is the Jil Sander for Uniqlo collection - a friend was showing me her lovely new cashmere/wool blend coat - lovely cut, beautifully soft and very warm, and apparently available in black and camel. Its a simple design but incorporates classic style, luxury fabrics and high street prices, and it doesn't try too hard - which I think is the ideal formula for these ventures.