Brand partnerships: are you pairing up or pairing off?

A few months have passed and I’m still thinking about the ‘gold baroque crystal encrusted box’ that McDonald’s and Julien Macdonald decided to jointly give to the world. It was a pairing that gave me similar feelings to when I walked past the Magnum x Moschino Pleasure Store in the summer. Was this a step too far for brand partnerships? I checked myself and thought: it’s the summer, the madness will cool down soon.
But the heat wave is long gone and the same sense o