It’s been a busy few weeks for Formula 1 (F1) driver Carlos Sainz Jr.: Last week he was unveiled as a L’Oreal global ambassador and starred in a series of videos for Allbirds. And today, he was unveiled as the new face of Hackett London’s Spring Summer 2025 campaign, alongside his father.
The decision to work with the suave Spanish father-son duo is something of a departure for the brand which typically looks to emphasise its connections to London — where it was founded and where last year’s Autumn Winter campaign was shot — and the British heritage movement.
But it’s not an unwelcome one.
Sainz Jr. is a former Scuderia Ferrari driver — his seat was taken by Sir Lewis Hamilton — who will make his debut with the Atlassian Williams team at next week's Melbourne Grand Prix; his father is a still-active rally car driver with four Dakar titles to his name, including the 2024 iteration which he won aged 61.
And Hackett has long associated itself with motorsport — including an ongoing collaboration with Formula E (the brand dresses the racing series’ staff) and previous collections inspired by racer Jenson Button.
The saying goes that money makes the world go round, but it's F1 cars and the men driving them (and it is just men for now) making the actual money. Last year, plenty were quick to deride the sixth season of Netflix’s Drive to Survive docu-series (the seventh series airs Friday onwards) because of a 30% drop in viewers, year-on-year — but it still clocked up more than 20 million hours of watch time in a single weekend and US TV viewership of actual races has doubled since the first series aired in 2019.
In October, the sport announced a historic 10-year partnership with LVMH. The amount that the luxury goods conglomerate decided to invest hasn’t been officially disclosed, but is rumoured to stretch to about $1billion over the course of the decade.
Sainz Jr. isn’t contracted to wear Hackett in the Paddock and you won’t see the brand’s logo popping up on his car, but association is key. L’Oreal makes sense: the poor guy has been asked to detail his hair care routine in multiple interviews before. And so does Hackett: both he and his father have talked, pre-campaign, about how much they like the clothes.
Oh yes, the clothes. They include a khaki safari-style jacket, blazers and Breton-stripe tops. You can some of the collection highlights in our image gallery, below.
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