New French Luxury: Art, Fashion and the Re-Invention of a National Brand

Abstract

The language of luxury goods in the early twenty-first century increasingly resembles the language of art – terms such as “investment piece” or “limited edition” are now integrated into fashion discourse. Concentrated in the main French corporate holdings – LVMH and Kering, or in privately owned companies such as Hermès and Chanel – the global luxury fashion brands now invest heavily in the art market to expand their influence across a broad spectrum of the visual arts, cinema, design, and architecture, to create a new intersectional definition of luxury within the global creative industries. In this article, we examine a number of case studies of collaborations between the leading Paris fashion houses and contemporary artists to illustrate this phenomenon and we conclude by arguing that the globalization of the luxury economy and the commercial expansion of the French fashion houses (targeting the consumer economies of the BRICS and the Middle East) has seen the image of France revitalized across the globe.

KEYWORDS:

• luxury
• fashion
• France
• contemporary art
• globalization
• co-branding

Notes

¹ http://www.gouvernement.fr/partage/3244-la-mode-et-le-luxe-secteur-d-excellence-française, accessed 2 July 2015.

² http://www.lvmh.fr/actualites-documents/documentation, accessed 2 July 2015.

³ This elevation of savoir-faire and artisanal crafts is protected today by houses such as Chanel, which has founded a subsidiary called Paraffection to group together the brand’s small savoir-faire houses, including façonniers such as the famous embroiderer Lesage.

⁴ “Intégrant habilement les processus créatifs, une grande partie des interactions entre l’art et la mode relève ainsi d’un fonctionnement où l’art est utilisé comme pur design (en référence à la capacité du design d’enjoliver les produits au gré des fluctuations de mode), et où il est employé pour produire une tension émotionnelle constante … jouant avec la nature immatérielle et symbolique des objets.”

⁵ Anne-Laure Quilleriet et Lydia Bacrie, “Vuitton réunit Marc Jacobs & Peter Marino à Bond Street,” http://www.lexpress.fr/styles/mode/louis-vuitton-reunit-marc-jacobs-amp-peter-marino-a-bond-street_895163.html, accessed August 1, 2015.

⁶ Didier Ludot also curates in-house exhibits, promoting vintage couture as works of art, including a tie-in alongside the Balenciaga retrospective at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2006.

⁷ “un nouveau mode de fonctionnement exploitant rationnellement et de manière généralisée les dimensions esthétiques-imaginaires-émotionnelles à des fins de profit et de conquête des marchés.”

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Silvano Mendes

Silvano Mendes is a Paris-based journalist, graduate of the Institut Français de la Mode, and a broadcaster for Radio France Internationale. He writes on fashion for the French and Brazilian press including Veja and TL magazines. He is also an associate lecturer in Fashion Communications at ESMOD in Paris and has worked as a brand image consultant for LVMH.

Nick Rees-Roberts

Nick Rees-Roberts is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of French at the University of Bristol, UK. He is the author of French Queer Cinema (Edinburgh University Press 2008), co-author of Homo exoticus: race, classe et critique queer (Armand Colin 2010), and co-editor of Alain Delon: Style, Stardom and Masculinity (Bloomsbury 2015). He is currently writing a book, Fashion Film: Art and Advertising in the Digital Age, for Bloomsbury. [email protected].