Chanel Mobile Art

High-end fashion brands are joining forces with artists to boost their image.

Luxury fashion houses have excelled for decades at creating beautiful emporiums in the hope of driving consumers through boutique doors to buy into the dream. These fashion stores can also remind consumers how powerful a brand is with no-expense-spared fit-outs. But as the bar rises and competition stiffens within the luxury industry, so too have the projects commissioned beyond the fashion realm. And it is all in the name of selling more bags, watches, pens, shoes and clothing.

Last week in Hong Kong, French fashion house Chanel officially launched its latest global power project, the ambitious Mobile Art. Commissioned by Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld, the futuristic mobile art gallery was designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning architect Zaha Hadid. Created from fibreglass panels, the 700-square-metre multimillion-dollar pavilion took six months to build and will be dismantled seven times to travel the world. For now its home will be Hong Kong's Star Ferry Car Park before it is packed into 65 containers and shipped to six more cities, ending its tour in Paris in 2010.

"The cost is not important. Chanel is about the dream," says Bruno Pavlovsky, director of Chanel's fashion division. "The project is more about building the Chanel image and what you see today is consistent with our vision for the next 10 years." The 20 commissioned artists had free reign to use any creative medium but all works had to be strictly inspired by the 2.55 quilted handbag designed by Coco Chanel in 1955.

Chanel's contemporary artists include Yoko Ono, Sophie Calle, Stephen Shaw, Wim Delvoye and Fabrice Hyber. Mobile Art curator and the editor-in-chief of the magazine Beaux-Arts Fabrice Bousteau says the initial list was "artists that I like - that's what a curator does. And all said yes, so we now have an exhibition with work by artists who have a strong personality and voice in their work."

The most controversial submission is Wim Delvoye's pigskin 2.55 bags (actually made in the Chanel workshop) and two stuffed tattooed pigs, named Jamie and Slobodan.

"We decided not to reject any project," Pavlovsky says. "Chanel herself was controversial, so to have pieces that evoke controversy is OK."

After the French artist Sophie Calle had accepted Chanel's commission, a work conflict led her to advertise in a Japanese magazine seeking an artist to carry out her project. Her vision was to stop passers-by, tell them to empty their bags and offer to buy both contents and the bag they were carrying. Soju Tao won the job with a bag budget of EUR11,000 ($17,794). Tao convinced several Chanel-toting strangers to hand over their bags with one 2.55 in the exhibition containing cash, house keys, a camera, mobile phone, an address book and Shirley MacLaine's book Out On A Limb.

Chanel is not the only luxury brand in recent times to collaborate with artists. Cartier's exhibition space in Paris is at its Foundation Cartier and features the work of contemporary artists and photographers. In 2004, Cartier gave the space to designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, who filled the room with intricate designer dresses made using bread. Hermes has exhibition spaces in its Ginza and Singapore boutiques, and currently has its Hbox mobile video theatre screening work by leading video artists at Paris Pompidou Centre.

In 2006, Louis Vuitton opened its permanent Espace Louis Vuitton gallery on the top floor of the luxury brand's Paris flagship store on the Champs-Elysees. The gallery opened with an exhibition called Alphabet Concept, by New York performance artist and photographer Vanessa Beecroft. Her 13 pictures portrayed nude women wearing clown wigs and with their bodies entwined to shape "LV". Also in 2006, nine artists, designers and architects, including Hadid, were commissioned to create bags for the exhibition space. The seventh and current exhibition, Orients Sans Frontiers, is inspired by the adventures of the automobile from Beirut to Beijing.

Currently running in Melbourne is High Art, a multi-venue exhibition which is part of L'Oreal Melbourne Fashion Festival. Taking place on shopping strip High Street, Armadale, Australian designers Scanlan & Theodore, Kirrily Johnston, Lisa Ho, Arabella Ramsay, ksubi, Lee Matthews and Herringbone have collaborated with artists to create installations inside their stores.

Next week Montblanc will take over Sydney's Martin Place with its own "art" installation. Famous for its pens, Montblanc commissioned six contemporary artists and photographers, including David LaChapelle, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Sam Taylor-Wood, Sylvie Fleury, Gary Hume, and Anne and Patrick Poirier to create six shopping bag sculptures. Standing three metres high, the bags have been exhibited on the Champs-Elysees and the Rockefeller Centre.

Designer exhibition spaces have been criticised by the art world, which claims there can be no creative independence when artists are commissioned by a commercial patron.

Yves Carcelle, chairman and CEO of Louis Vuitton Malletier, told the BBC at the opening of Espace: "The artists were free in their work. The main difference between art and creativity in fashion is that in fashion you need to sell the product. Art works only if you give it total freedom." When asked if Espace was designed to sell more handbags to tourists, especially the Japanese, who flock to the store to worship the logo-decorated luggage, the answer was: "Sell more handbags? Yes, that's my dream."

Chanel's Pavlovsky is also honest in what Mobile Art hopes to achieve: to sell more bags. "We hope the exhibition will create a strong image for the 2.55. Chanel No. 5 and the fashion already have its own iconic status."

Source: WA Today

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