fashion art wu

The cool new way to get one’s culture is not by going to the museum’, claimed Le Monde life-style editor Véronique Lorelle on the eve of the financial crisis, ‘but going shopping.’ The expedition she championed on the eve of the financial crisis, was not a trip to the local corner shop, but a pilgrimage to an emporium like that of Louis Vuitton on the Champs-Elysées—tantamount to ‘entering a dream world’. Here, according to the lv president, customers could enjoy a light sculpture by James Turrell, or experience a giddying moment of gravity-free sensory deprivation in Olafur Eliasson’s all-black elevator. Above all, he emphasized, clients ‘will not quickly forget the brand’.footnote1 Such comments from the Louis Vuitton chief are both unexpected and revealing. Unexpected, because one would have thought that lv already enjoyed the highest of international reputations. Revealing, because it suggests that the luxury industry has been immersed in some sort of branding tussle, in which the company must struggle against its rivals for recognition. If so, what defines this field of battle? And what does art have to do with it? Though they have long been intertwined, the relationship between art and fashion entered a new phase in the Reagan–Thatcher era. It was the asymmetrical conflation of public and private—public resources progressively subjected to private control—that helped to determine the direction contemporary art would take in subsequent years, accelerating a certain depoliticization of art and reorienting it towards the ideology of the market. Cultural creativity was elided with capitalism’s need for constant innovation. By the 1990s, the ‘rise of the creative class’ was well underway, the coinage adopted by New Labour’s culture secretary, Chris Smith, to celebrate ‘Creative Britain’. The art-world response was an increasingly blatant commodification, enabling its progressive appropriation by commercial interests within the creative ‘industries’. In the new millennium, what forms has this relationship been taking in the flagship stores of Louis Vuitton, Prada and Hermès? And in the context of recent debates on ‘value-setting’ for high-end assets,footnote2 what light can it shed on contemporary forms of capital and culture? New Medicis In early 2008, the Paris-based Journal des Arts posed the question: ‘Are we witnessing the emergence of a new form of patronage in the field of contemporary art?’footnote3 The occasion was the appearance of two art projects financed by the ‘heavy-weights of the luxury industry’, Chanel and Hermès: ‘nomad exhibitions’, housed in avant-garde architectural constructs, or roaming capsules, as the Journal des Arts put it. Chanel’s Mobile Art pavilion, conceived by Karl Lagerfeld and designed by Zaha Hadid—‘inspired by the brand’s distinctive layering of exquisite details within an elegant, cohesive whole’—featured an exhibition curated by Fabrice Bousteau, editorial director of Beaux Arts, to which Daniel Buren, Sylvie Fleury, Yoko Ono and Wim Delvoye agreed to contribute works inspired by a Chanel handbag.footnote4 Over at Hermès, the ‘aluminium pod’ of the H Box, the creation of artist-architect Didier Fiuza Faustino, housed video installations curated by Benjamin Weil, director of New York’s Artists Space. Both could be dismantled and reconstructed as nomadic showcases, travelling wherever they saw fit. Prada jumped on the bandwagon the following year with its Prada Transformer, which came to rest in Seoul. The deluxe fashion houses appeared to catch on to this ‘deterritorialized’ mode of operation simultaneously. It permitted a new kind of flexibility and freedom. But like all ‘creative’ interventions undertaken by commercial enterprises, it needed the imprimatur of the art world to grant it status and respectability. As Hermès artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas said, the H Box ‘was legitimate only if it was recognized by international institutions.’footnote5 The pillars of the art world were happy to oblige. The H Box was showcased at the Pompidou Centre in November 2007 and displayed in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in August 2008, after stops in Luxemburg and Spain. Chanel Mobile Art premiered at the 2007 Venice Biennale and travelled to Hong Kong and Tokyo before landing in Central Park, nyc, in October 2008, amid stormy protests over the bail-out of Wall Street and the fortunes accumulated by the 1 per cent. In these circumstances, Chanel called a sudden halt to the world tour of Mobile Art, citing changed economic circumstances.footnote6 By contrast to these ‘nomadic operations’, there is much more at stake in the case of fashion-house flagship stores, not just financially but also in terms of reputation. Nevertheless, over the past decade, the era of austerity, the industry heavyweights have actually expanded their appetite for statement-making art and architecture ventures. Here one name stands out among the luxury brands. Prada—whose head designer, Miuccia Prada and her husband, ceo Patrizio Bertelli, have been described as ‘modern-day Medicis’ for their patronage of architecture—has embarked on a staggeringly ambitious and audacious flagship-store expansion plan.footnote7 Ambitious not least because of its big name, and the big money needed to finance it. Audacious because the flagship store, while it is a bona fide clothes shop, gives the impression of being ‘some avant-garde installation on the art of shopping’, thereby transforming the simple act of buying clothes into what the trade jargon calls the ‘experience economy’.footnote8 At the start of the new millennium, Prada opened three flagship stores under the ‘Epicenter’ rubric in the space of a few years: New York, Tokyo and Los Angeles. The New York shop reputedly cost $40 million, Tokyo $87 million.footnote9 How to value a skirt Prada’s New York and Los Angeles stores were designed by Rem Koolhaas and his oma offices, while the Tokyo Epicenter was the work of Herzog & de Meuron, who explained that the building’s glazed rhomboid grid would offer customers ‘an almost cinematic perspective on Prada products, the city and themselves’. Prada has used the Tokyo store to stage what they call ‘international touring exhibitions’ such as 2004’s Waist Down. Designed by oma, this so-called exhibition aimed, to quote Miuccia Prada, to exalt ‘skirts in general through the creativity of Prada skirts’.footnote10 Indeed, in this respect high fashion is unlike other commodities: a petrochemical or pharmaceutical product, for example, cannot be displayed in an art museum without being directly mediated by an artist, while exclusive clothes by celebrity designers can readily be transferred to form an art-museum exhibit. This seemingly effortless ‘crossover’ between art and fashion has the advantage of giving high fashion legitimacy, as far as its entrée into the world of art is concerned. Treating couture as art thus cements a marriage of convenience, endowing clothes with high-art status and bringing catwalk glamour to cash-starved museums. Indeed, a Japanese critic praised the Waist Down show for not taking ‘the typical approach that would bring fashion items into an art museum, an avenue that cannot possibly be seen as forward-looking in an age where art itself is venturing out of art museums.’ The fact that this exhibition actually took place in a fashion shop showed the way things were likely to go in the future.footnote11 Is the practice of exhibiting fashion items in a shop somehow more forward-looking, more atypical than displaying them in an art museum? Any Japanese consumer familiar with the architects of the Prada store would probably know that Tate Modern was their handiwork, too. The display of objects couched in the smart language of contemporary conceptual art, under the imprimatur of Herzog & de Meuron and Rem Koolhaas, was clearly intended to elevate Prada skirts to the level of contemporary art and architecture. By the time the skirts reached Shanghai in May 2005, the Waist Down show, marketed as an art exhibit—its ‘evolution’ at each store ‘interpretative and site-specific’—had generated ‘enormous buzz’, according to Newsweek. The magazine even claimed that the show was ‘a clever way into a communist country with little fashion press’, a view no doubt shared by Prada’s Bertelli, for whom the occasion would provide ‘the opportunity to interact not only with fashion people, but with curators, media, business people and politicians’—perhaps Prada’s most revealing statement about what the driving force behind the company’s patronage of art and architecture has been.footnote12 What are the economic realities behind these displays? It should be borne in mind that flagship stores are rarely profitable, since they generate high costs but limited turnover.footnote13 In Prada’s case, moreover, this expansion came at a time when the company’s profits had fallen from £36 million in 2001 to £19 million in 2002. Its reported overall debt stood at €1.5 billion in 2003. While this investment clearly goes against business common sense, there is a calculation behind it in terms of brand identity and market positioning. As the Swiss architect Jacques Herzog remarked at the opening of the Tokyo store: ‘Miuccia wanted to use architecture to reinvent the brand.’ Prada’s spokesperson put it in much the same terms: ‘By using iconic architects, Prada is building brand equity.’footnote14 The exact nature of their brand identity is hard to define, but Prada has been described as an ‘intellectual design group’, its architectural pretensions earning it praise as one of the most ‘inventive’ and ‘daring’ names in the business.footnote15 Ultimately, fashion houses’ investments in these temples of art and wealth aim to boost their aura of exclusivity. This is all the more essential when these hypertrophied luxury brands are having to seek mass-market sales to sustain their borrowing—either by buying up other firms, as lvmh, in particular, has been doing, or through cutting deals with high-street chains, like Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, who remarked, ‘Being at both ends of the market is the height of luxury’—while at the same time maintaining their positions in the luxury marketplace.footnote16 Capital and culture In their recent contributions, Luc Boltanski and Arnaud Esquerre have analysed the modalities of value-setting for high-end assets, in a world economy characterized by gluts of labour, capital and productive capacity. Using the two axes of temporality and differentiation, they suggest that luxury firms must invest resources in identifying their goods with ‘collectibles’, such as art works or fine wines, that have acquired the patina of history or been endowed with a unique narrative from the past. They distinguish this form of valuation from that of the financial asset, which in temporal terms is set on the basis of future returns, while it is differentiated in terms of liquidity or fixedness.footnote17 In these terms, fashion houses’ patronage of the arts might be seen as a blend of luxury and financial forms: the narrative they seek to create to boost their valuations is oriented to the future, through its stress on creativity and the avant-garde, while at the same time emphasizing exclusivity. How, more concretely, should these forms be understood within the different sectors of the global economy? Nancy Fraser, in her reply to Boltanski and Esquerre, argues that, by contrast to manufacturing and finance, ‘collectibles’ and the luxury-goods industry may best be understood as ‘an exotic corner of present-day capitalism’, a marginal niche where fading powers—France, Italy, Spain—‘devise ingenious ways to live off their former glories’, like cash-poor aristocrats who turn their châteaux into tour stops. Viewed from Guangzhou, the world’s manufacturing workshop, or New York, its citadel of finance, luxury assets are much less salient.footnote18 But this is to overlook the importance of the enormous Asian market to the high-end fashion houses. Here the French haute-couture house Hermès has been another significant player. With the Asian market accounting for almost half its sales worldwide, Hermès has made concerted efforts to mobilize contemporary art in the marketing of its image, especially in Japan and Korea.footnote19 Japan alone contributed 29 per cent of Hermès’s sales in 2005, a much higher proportion than America (15 per cent) or the whole of Europe outside France (17 per cent). Japanese brand devotees have thus been especially pampered, with specific this-store-only luxury goods and greater choice available in more sumptuous outlets. The first Hermès flagship store outside Paris and New York was based in Tokyo: an 11-storey, glass and brick mega-store, designed by Renzo Piano of Centre Pompidou fame, which cost $138 million to build. At present, Hermès has two Asian flagship stores, in Tokyo and Seoul.footnote20 Compared with those owned by other Western luxury companies, the two Maisons Hermès are not only signature architectural buildings in their own right, but have custom-designed, built-in art and cultural facilities within the complex of the shopping floors. The Hermès emporium in Tokyo has ‘enriched’ the shopping experience of its devotees with a cutting-edge contemporary art gallery, a film studio—its screenings match the yearly theme of the Hermès collections—and an exclusive ‘museum’, displaying Hermès memorabilia from the nineteenth century onwards, to provide a comprehensive narrative of the house. It endows itself with exclusivity by being ‘appointment only’ for visitors—not to mention the fact that each visitor is made to put on a white robe to enter the ‘museum’, so that its objects stand out against a completely white interior. In Ginza, Tokyo’s prime shopping area, where every square inch of space is at a premium, the art and cultural facilities provided at the Maison Hermès are spectacular. Why is the company so keen to do all of this? Hermès artistic director Pierre-Alexis Dumas attempts to explain: It’s part of a programme of patronage, a high-profile policy of supporting emerging talent. But it’s more than that, even: it’s useful for our organization to have a presence in all fields of creativity. It is important for us to diversify, from architecture to design to contemporary art. It is important for us to keep being creative, otherwise we run the risk of drying up.footnote21 The aestheticization of commercial space—indeed its ‘museumification’—that we see in the case of Hermès is designed not simply to sell goods, but to serve as a kind of ‘walk-in advertisement’, a means of positioning the brand and selling the unique lifestyle and experience that a luxury object implies.footnote22 As the luxury fashion houses’ ambitions have grown, so has their involvement in contemporary art. The last decade has spawned further flagship art projects from the most prestigious houses, including Louis Vuitton and Prada. The €100 million, 68,965 square foot home of the Louis Vuitton Foundation for Creation, designed by Frank Gehry, was announced in a blaze of publicity in 2006. When the building opened eight years later, the ceremony was graced by François Hollande. In Milan, meanwhile, Prada announced a permanent home for its Prada Foundation at Largo Isarco, designed by its long-time architectural partner Rem Koolhaas. This would not be a mere museum, Miuccia assured the press, but rather ‘the continuation of an intellectual process founded on the exploration of doubt and on extensive research’.footnote23 In May 2011, at the height of the Eurozone financial crisis, Prada opened yet another space, occupying the eighteenth-century Palazzo Corner della Regina in Venice—targeting the steady stream of biennial art visitors, as well as the hordes of ordinary tourists. Poor Venice already hosted two François Pinault museums—the Palazzo Grassi, which opened in 2006, and the Punta della Dogana, opened in 2009—and the long-established Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art.footnote24 In contrast to corporate-art interventions in the 1980s, when the general aim was to bring art into office space, this new fashion-branded landscape of contemporary art is intended to bring avant-garde works into contact with luxury shopping spaces—exploiting art so as to mediate the experience of conspicuous consumption. The symbolic aspect of this consumption can easily be lost sight of in the dazzling array of eye-catching objects that are its surface feature. Both the objects themselves and the environment designed to promote them are signs in a more complex cultural system. Roland Barthes described fashion as a code that gives access to a system of meaning in which the actual object is less important than its description and presentation. It is not the artefact itself that is the object of desire, but the name bestowed upon it. And what sells artefacts is not the dream of possessing them, but the meanings with which they are invested.footnote25 Had Barthes lived into the era of globalization, he would surely have added that fashion is a phenomenon that knows no cultural boundaries—a supranational, indeed a world language. But what Barthes would not necessarily have foreseen is how the language of fashion has come to join forces in such a spectacular way with the languages of both art and architecture. The marriage between art and fashion, transnational as it may be, is one whose meaning depends upon the privileges of the exclusive few at the top of the exchange-economy pyramid, even as it exploits the dreams of the vast majority at the bottom.