Louis Vuitton’s Nicolas Ghesquière might agree with 18th century English novelist Frances Burney: the appeal of fashion lies in an attempt to reconcile the contradictory desires for submersion in collective participation and individual self-expression. Fashion offers esoteric belonging to stylistic acolytes, as well as the consolations of uniqueness. Something like Becket’s Godot as the ideal designer, who can never arrive.
If that is true, then the newly dressed Louis Vuitton boutique on Bond Street is certainly homage to the power of fashion to merge and emerge, to continually and endlessly reaffirm, reshape, re-evaluate. Architect Peter Marino, who designed the new shop, has stated that the interplay between his projects and their landscape is essential to his vision. And so, too, the Vuitton Soho store re-imagined as process: informing Soho, and informed by it.
The foundation of the shop might be thought of as a medium upon which to declare the transitory, even fleeting nature of high fashion: the flat-finished hardwood floors, the long whitewashed rooms, the strong geometric and planar lines, the track lighting all seek to enhance the material objects for sale. Moreover, columns hand-painted with symbols by Mukai Shuji barrage visitors with the very same idea; meanings come and go, spilling out from their columns across floor and ceiling and culminating in a jumbled swarm of meaningless signifiers, leaving the color and shifting form of the furnishings as the only substantive resolution. The history of Soho as the essential arts district in America, packaged.
Elsewhere, high fashion and art coalesce absolutely, if playfully; the scarf department hangs framed scarves as installations, while handbags and shoes are, in their sections, isolated as three-dimensional, sculptural representations. The approach becomes a little heavy-handed in its intensity, but the carefully considered marketing aesthetics are fascinating in and of themselves.
This may be the point, of course: to dazzle until the dazzling turns self-consciously thought-provoking, and transparent. The shop then becomes a witty comment on high-end fashion consumerism that engages effectively by becoming almost satiric, and including the individual in the humor: witness the earthy, primeval leather-and-bronze installation by Giusseppe Penone, contrasted over the Bauhaus stairwell.
What better way to sell the mercurial immediacy of high fashion.
