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Louis
Vuitton: Art, Fashion, Architecture with essays
by Jill Gasparina, Taro Igarashi, and Olivier Saillard
Rizzoli, 2009
Hardcover, 404 pages
The relationships between fashion
and the realms of art and architecture are complex, interrelated,
and contested. Contemporary architecture can paradoxically
attribute much of its appeal and derision from fashion's
search for the ever-new and the glitzy building designs
produced in the desire to attract the attention of travelers,
shoppers, and more clients. In turn fashion companies use
architecture as another element in promoting their brands,
none better than Louis
Vuitton, the French fashion house known for its travel
ware, accessories, and logo. An extension of the company's
goods and graphic design are the buildings that house and
display the same. Examples can be found in Tokyo, Seoul,
New York, and the pages of this large-format encyclopedia
of sorts that explores how Louis Vuitton incorporates art
and architecture into its world.
A recent stroll past Bloomingdales
in Midtown Manhattan last week (captured at left) brought
the overlap of fashion and architecture to the fore. Carefully
choreographed storefront displays of shoes are bordered
by a custom LV monogram pattern set behind glass; a slowly-changing
kaleidoscope of colors animate the latter. Here architecture
is not only the framework for the fashion, it is what gets
the most attention, beckoning those across the street as
well as those passing by. To me, the shoes get lost in the
intersection of monogram pattern and parallel red lines
repeating ad infinitum in the mirrored border, but the facade
and display set the mood and thereby reduce the need for
the shoes to do the work.
This temporary storefront can be
seen as a miniature version of the Louis
Vuitton flagship store a few blocks west, on Fifth Avenue,
by Jun Aoki. That store "dresses" an existing
Art Deco building with insulated glass covered with a complex
frit pattern that subtly changes as one moves. The overall
effect is a veil with translucent openings putting the wares
(barely) on display. Aoki's design fits into critic Taro
Igarashi's assertion of "Architectures of Superflat"
in his essay that starts this book. While discussing architecture
in Japan specifically, LV's adoption of a trend that can
be called Japanese is used internationally in many of the
fashion company's stores. The style of sorts, like the storefront
miniature, uses abstraction, repetition, and the metaphor
of a layer of clothes over the body to creates a mood, an
aura, and an image that says everything and nothing at the
same time. The numerous veils that drape the many LV stores
are distinctive but anonymous without their distinctive
logo. But in combination they convey something about the
brand and their wares that neither of these can accomplish
without architecture. This book is a document of an astute
company's ability to use architecture to spread its brand,
while at the same time advancing architecture in its effects
and aspirations.
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