Thursday, Oct. 11, 2007

Art Lessons

By Kate Betts

The ceiling of the tent inside the Louvre's Cour Carree, where Marc Jacobs was showing his spring 2008 collection for Louis Vuitton, was lined with giant pulp-romance-novel covers featuring lurid titles like Taipei After Dark and louche images of pinup girls in trashy lingerie. When 12 curvy models strutted onto the runway dressed in opaque white nurses' coats and prim white hats, their mouths covered with black-lace face masks, the audience might have imagined it was witnessing a 3-D rendition of artist Richard Prince's famous nurse-paintings series. And indeed, the real point of the evening was to create a setting for the multicolored handbags done up in silk-screened LV logos created by Prince, the result of a recent collaboration with Jacobs.

The cachet that contemporary art can bestow on fashion was one of the big creative and commercial themes at the recent runway shows in Paris and Milan. Miuccia Prada collaborated with architect Rem Koolhaas and graphic-design company 2x4 to create dizzying backdrops for her Art Nouveau-inspired prints. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana opened their show with a video of an artist painting a canvas with flowers. The models appeared in dresses of hand-painted organza. Although there was no direct collaboration, the brilliant layers of opaque color that Raf Simons created for the Jil Sander show looked like an homage to the color-field works of painters like Mark Rothko and Ellsworth Kelly.

"Everyone who is interested in luxury is interested in contemporary art now, even if they are not collectors," says Yves Carcelle, president of LVMH fashion group. "Collaborating with contemporary artists brings a new kind of creative fecundity to the product. It forces a di!=erent creativity than that of just fashion."

Collaboration between art and fashion has a long history. Designers like Coco Chanel and Christian Dior were famously inspired by artists like Jean Cocteau and Christian Berard. But in the current age of opulence, in which contemporary artworks sell at auction for tens and sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars, the relationship has become even more entwined. Art fairs like Miami Art Basel and the Venice Biennale have emerged as important marketplaces for luxury brands like Gucci, Cartier and Bulgari. A fashion-forward designer like Jacobs works with trailblazing artists like Prince and Japan's Takashi Murakami.

Even at the retail level, luxury-goods houses are falling over themselves to commission in-store art installations. Last year Louis Vuitton ordered up an installation by Olafur Eliasson for its Christmas windows in 360 stores around the world. Similarly, the Jil Sander store in Chicago has just tapped local artists Selina Trepp, Cody Hudson and Terence Hannum to display their works as part of a show entitled "Throb Throb: Rock and Roll Currents in Chicago Art Today."

Although many luxury-goods executives say novelty is key to remaining competitive in this wear-it-all era of $2,000 handbags and $20 H&M dresses, plugging into the contemporary-art scene is also a way to stay one step ahead of another kind of artist: the knockoff artist. In a world where everything can be downloaded and copied in less than a fortnight, the thinking is that merchandise with unique craftsmanship, materials and ideas behind it will be harder to reproduce quickly.

"It's a timing problem ultimately," says Fendi CEO Michael Burke. "It used to be that we had six months to show something and then manufacture it. Now it only takes a week to copy something from an image on the Internet. So creatively, you have to be more and more unique."

Some designers are using far-out technology to create limited-edition pieces that are almost as expensive as a work of art. Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquiere cut old-fashioned floral-printed radzimir, the heavy silk once used for mourning garments, with a laser and then bonded it with the flexible, breathable high-tech fabric commonly found in extreme-sports apparel. The dresses will retail for $7,000. At Roger Vivier, a pair of chiffon-and-leather sandals, braided and painted by hand, will ring in at $4,000--and only three pairs will be made. "Where is the luxury if you see things everywhere?" asks Claudio Castiglioni, the global CEO of Tod's group, which owns the Vivier brand. Indeed, where is the art?