The Las Vegas Grand Prix is making fashion splurge

The Future. This weekend’s Las Vegas Grand Prix is attracting major cultural attention, thrilling fashion brands, celebrities, and the media. While Liberty Media, the owner of F1, may have oversold its demand (potentially due to a drama-free race season), the success of an event that puts the fastest cars in the world on the Vegas Strip may inherently be the most dramatic backdrop for some good ol’-fashioned marketing.

Season’s spending
The Las Vegas Grand Prix may be the biggest event in modern fashion history. Wait, what?

• Brands such as Tommy Hilfiger, Puma, TAG Heuer, Palace, and Sacai are sponsoring teams and releasing unique capsules for the event, even tapping celebrities to act as creative directors.
• They’re also hosting huge parties and events, with TAG Heuer, a partner of the Red Bull team, spending over $21,000 on each VIP guest they’re hosting during the weekend.
• All of that is expensive but apparently worth it: the average F1 fan is 32, decades younger than that of the NBA and NFL — exactly the customer fashion is after.
• Tommy Hilfiger, which has been deeply involved in F1, says the event will soon be bigger than the Super Bowl and has already seen sales in the US jump because of ties to the sport.

Liberty Media has spent $500 million on the event and expects it to be massive — with 100,000 fans lining up along the famed Vegas strip, performances from J Balvin and Will.i.am, and $1.3 billion in economic impact.

Or, that’s the hope. A Bloomberg report found there’s still a surprising number of tickets on sale (and at a discount), and resorts are quickly lowering their prices to fill free rooms. Why? According to several analysts, initial price inflation from “corporate hospitality.”

So, the Las Vegas Grand Prix may be racing to the clearance rack.