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Re-presentation as a Form of Artistic and Cultural Legitimization

In 2003, fashion designer Alexander McQueen presented a fashion show explicitly inspired by the film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?2. Presented as a dance competition, the show was particularly critical of the capitalist system, which structures the fashion and luxury industry. Asked backstage by a journalist who asked him “whether [he thought his show] was fashion or entertainment”, McQueen answered without hesitation: “It was art”3. In another interview, however, McQueen said, in reference to his brand, that “everything is for sale; everything”4, a statement that underscores the commercial dimension of his previously artistic activity. Although some fashion designers develop an indisputable esthetic, often celebrated as a work of art through media discourse, the economic models and goals that determine a fashion brand can compromise this dimension and the possible artistically oriented values that may result from it.

While fashion has regularly rubbed shoulders with the world of art, in various forms and practices, it remains nonetheless and even essentially a creative industry. Before becoming a couturier, Christian Dior was a great lover of art, visiting many of the artists of his time; one of Yves Saint Laurent’s most successful collections dates from 1965 and features motifs inspired by the paintings of Piet Mondrian. In Paris, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs is an institutional space dedicated to fashion,5 among other things, while the Palais Galliera is the Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris6. In her article on the possible link between fashion and art, Diana Crane underlines the many partnerships set up between couturiers and artists but also the desire of men and women involved in fashion to be perceived as artists:

From the end of the 19th Century and again in the 20th Century, fashion designers like Worth claimed an artist status. [...] In the 1930s, Italian seamstress Elsa Schiaparelli collaborated with artists such as Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau and designed clothes that conformed to the esthetic principles of the Surrealist movement. (Crane 2012, p. 242, author’s translation)

Today, the industrialization of luxury fashion is accentuating the serial dimension of the sector’s goods, which is the antithesis of the aforementioned narratives and practices, linking couturiers to artists and artists to couturiers. Yet, from an obvious point of view, art and culture are particularly present in the discourses and objects of the fashion industry. This presence emanates from the need to make up the industrial or semi-industrial and also serial dimension of certain luxury products – such as purses – as well as the hypervisibility and hyperexposure of fashion brands on social networks. The result of this constraint is the trivialization of the sector, which is supposed to promote rarity, selectivity and craftsmanship.

This is where the sector’s strategies come into play, strategies that often consist of disguising the promotional discourse implemented by the various luxury houses and, above all, proposing a new positioning that is likely to reintroduce the original characteristics and values of this industry. While the selectivity and rarity of luxury goods are disappearing, communication and marketing strategies are developing discourses and products that tend toward a movement in line with these characteristics. This movement corresponds, on the one hand, and from a theoretical point of view, to that of artification; in other words, to this “transformation process of non-art into art, the result of a complex work that generates a change in the definition and status of people, objects and activities” (Shapiro 2012, p. 20, author’s translation).

On the other hand, it corresponds to the culturization process, a process in which “products that are not initially cultural and artistic in nature are nevertheless given some of the symbolic attributes of culture and art” (Bouquillion et al. 2013, p. 11, author’s translation).

Throughout this first chapter, I will try to account for the way in which both luxury fashion products and their traditional enhancement processes, such as media advertising or modes of distribution, are determined by re-presentational characteristics emanating from the two movements mentioned above: artification, affecting more the actors and fashion brands, and culturization, affecting the industry products in question.

1.1. The work of art and its reproducibility at the service of the fashion industry

In April 2017, the French brand Louis Vuitton, a member of the LVMH group, celebrated an exclusive and ephemeral collaboration with contemporary artist Jeff Koons. The collaboration focused on the creation of a collection of purses and some accessories, entitled “Masters LV x Koons”, materialized in two special editions, launched, respectively, in April and October 2017. In both cases, the work of the artist Jeff Koons and his creative studio focused on presenting the purses and accessories with motifs from pictorial works such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa for the first edition or Claude Monet’s7 Water Lilies for the second. The launch of the first collection was celebrated at the Louvre Museum in Paris, while the launch of the second collection was celebrated at Koons’ studio in New York.

Founded in 1854 as a company specializing in the creation of luxury trunks, Louis Vuitton expanded its business activities into ready-to-wear in 1997. It owns 95 commercial spaces, including boutiques and corners in department stores and airports. Firmly established in the luxury sector, the company offers products at fairly high prices, ranging from 250 euros for a small leather goods item to 35,000 euros for a crocodile leather purse.

The collaboration between the contemporary artist Jeff Koons and Louis Vuitton was not an original or innovative strategy within the framework of what is called co-branding8. On the contrary, with a view to novelty and also as part of the search for notoriety other than commercial fame, luxury brands – and from time to time those of other segments as well9 – produce so-called “capsule” collections designed by guest artists. One example is the Hermès brand, which has invited artists to revisit one of its flagship products, the carré Hermès. Between 2008 and 2015, this initiative resulted in Hermès products signed by Daniel Buren, Julio Le Parc and Hiroshi Sugimoto. In 2013, it was Alexander McQueen’s turn to collaborate with artist Damien Hirst to propose a scarf, while in 2011 and for Miami Art Basel, Dior gave artist Anselm Reyle carte blanche to revisit the Lady Dior bag.

However, the collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Jeff Koons seems to be involved in an approach that is part of an assumed desire to introduce both the product and the brand into a massively recognized and legitimate artistic heritage. Indeed, while the examples mentioned above tend to endow commercial goods with an artistic dimension as soon as they bear a double signature, that of the brand and that of the artist leaving their mark on the product, their recognition and the acceptance of their possible artistic value still require a certain knowledge of contemporary art. This is not the case with the “Masters LV x Koons” collection, whose name (Masters) was indicative of an artistic foundation that affected both the brand and the guest artist. The semantic shift reflected a well-targeted intention on the part of the brand: the Masters in question, i.e. the great masters of classical painting, were mobilized for Louis Vuitton. They gave the brand their legitimacy and their talent. Moreover, the choice to retain an artistic paradigm that is historically and institutionally shared through particularly well-known works of art such as the Mona Lisa, the Water Lilies or The Tiger Hunt, among others, and a contemporary artist emblematic of the sector – Jeff Koons is the most expensive living artist in the world – suggest the desire to link tradition and modernity, an institutional and also economic recognition.

1.1.1. Culturization of the purse, and portability of the work of art

The symbolic transformation of Louis Vuitton brand products by Jeff Koons was thus based on two (transformational) movements: culturization and artification. The first does not affect the strategies mobilized by market players as much as the symbolic value of the goods. It is a movement that, from a semiotic point of view, manifests itself in presentia10 and bears witness to the transformation, both material and visual, that determines the market good, in this case the purse. As the authors of this notion indicate, what is culturized11 is the merchandise that borrows “certain processes from the cultural industries in general and from the editorial model in particular: pre-launch buzz, maintenance of fan clubs, creation of events, artificial production of rarity, starization and mediatization of creative bosses or engineers, etc.” (Bouquillion et al. 2013, pp. 162–163, author’s translation). The second movement accounts for the metamorphic process that affects the actors involved in the market good. It is capitalized on as a process in absentia because...