Of Fashion and Space
The Celine store on Bond Street, London (image: courtesy of Celine).
“The circus-like and theatrical element of commerce is quite extraordinarily heightened,” wrote an unusually keen observer of the 19th-century Parisian department store. These words appear in Walter Benjamin’s unfinished set of notes on the Paris arcades, written between 1927 and 1940, and published in English in 1982 as The Arcades Project. The book gives snippets of insight into how the acts of shopping and wandering the city changed in the aftermath of Baron Hausmann’s sweeping alterations to the architectural fabric of Paris. “The department store is the last promenade for the flâneur,” concluded Benjamin. This was before the arrival of the internet.
In the 21st century, the acts of walking and buying have taken on new guises. Sixty-three per cent of all shoppers’ journeys now begin in the virtual arcades of online stores. We click our way through the pages of the web, largely guided by the inscrutable algorithms of targeted advertising, while the consumers of mid-19th century Paris strolled the streets, drawn in by shop displays and mirrors. Ours is not just a quick outing for cheap conveniences, such as cat food and fast fashion, but a deeply committed hike for luxury products, such as sofas, designer handbags and even jewellery.
Today, the tug of war between the virtual and the physical means that bricks-and-mortar stores have to work harder to bring in their clientele. This is particularly evident in luxury fashion, where considerable investment goes into creating environments that embody clothes in physical spaces – inevitably at exclusive addresses – as extensions of a brand’s value. Take the Louis Vuitton store on London’s New Bond Street, with its multicolour starburst facade decoration and brightly coloured interiors – it is a far cry from the maison’s previously sombre boutiques decked out in brown wood. Or the nearby Paul Smith store on Albemarle Street, the sinuous cast-iron exterior of which was designed by 6a Architects, which features eclectic interiors stuffed with trinkets that the brand and its founder have accumulated from around the globe. Even this is likely to be squeezed, however. It is thought that around £1 of every £5 spent with UK retailers now changes hands online – a figure predicted to rise to 53 per cent of all retail expenditure within a decade. As shopping online is increasingly regarded as easier, more convenient and, in light of Covid-19, safer, luxury retail spaces are playing up their cultural cachet and visual titillation as a differentiating factor. Typically, this is achieved through investment in architecture, design and art.
Since the 1950s, the fashion boutique has been the domain of architects and designers – practitioners chosen to give the desired sense of individuality to a brand’s premises. Designer and entrepreneur Terence Conran worked with Mary Quant on her second Bazaar boutique in London in the 1950s, and subsequently modelled his own design store Habitat, which opened in the 1960s, on Bazaar’s fun and easy-going atmosphere. The architect Eva Jiřičná, meanwhile, created the sleek and minimal interiors of London-based fashion brand Joseph in the 1980s. “One thing I realised through all those years of doing interiors,” Jiřičná told the Guardian in 2006, “is that the prime reason for having an exterior of a building is the necessity of having an interior.”
In the 1990s and 2000s, architect Peter Marino broke the mould of working on stores locally and instead rolled out global store identities for many of fashion’s most prominent houses, including Christian Dior and Chanel. While Marino’s portfolio of retail designs became increasingly ostentatious and grand, setting the tone for an era of so-called “flagship stores”, his creations were still places for shopping. “My work, like advertising, is built on the statistic that of the four people who enter the shop three will leave without having bought anything,” Marino told the Financial Times in 2019. “The point of my doing a beautiful store is that, aspirationally, those three people will return and become one of the purchasers next time.”
Oscar Tuazon’s 2019 Mobile Floor installation for Celine’s rue de Grenelle boutique in Paris.
Then, in 2001, the architecture firm OMA designed the Prada Epicenter in New York, setting a distinctly different tone for the consumption of fashion. The 2,200sqm store still exists today and is more akin to an event and art space than a boutique, dominated by the “Wave”, a 54m-long ramp that doubles as a collection showcase, podium and seating. For OMA’s founder Rem Koolhaas, the Prada Epicenter was an attempt to move away from what he described as “the Flagship syndrome” or “a megalomaniac accumulation of the obvious”. Alongside Rei Kawakubo’s Dover Street Market – which opened in London’s Mayfair in 2004, with its loose layout of shops within shops modelled on the multi-brand fashion space Kensington Market – the Prada Epicenter pointed to another function for fashion retailers. They are not just as spaces for commerce, but venues for cultural interaction, hosting talks, book launches and exhibitions. They encourage a loosely defined form of brand engagement over shopping.
In the digital age, an increasing number of fashion brands are taking this route, devising curated environments that invite people in without commitment to purchase. Take, for example, Loewe’s new stores in Madrid and London, which feature a number of historical and contemporary art and design pieces selected by creative director Jonathan Anderson; or footwear brand Dr Martens’s The Boot Room, which is an intimate music venue in London’s Camden Market. “It’s not a fashion store,” Anderson told interviewer Nosheen Iqbal in 2019 when asked about Loewe’s London flagship. “I mean, yes, that’s the purpose, but I want people to be able to go in. It’s this idea of[...] changing the way in which we see stores.”
The Celine Art Project is the most recent example of this approach. Helmed by Hedi Slimane, Celine’s creative director, the initiative launched last autumn and currently comprises works from 33 artists displayed in Celine stores globally. Slimane is working closely with the participating artists and their galleries to either select existing works or commission new ones. Encouragingly, the collection has skewed towards a younger generation of artists (almost everyone featured in the Celine Art Project is under the age of 40, with the exception of a handful of established artists, such as David Nash, Luisa Gardini and Theaster Gates) and exhibits a far healthier gender balance than many similar undertakings.
The pieces in the Celine Art Project are not for sale, but instead form part of Celine’s growing art holding, an integral element of the brand’s new store interiors. Under Slimane’s direction, these spaces have become large and open-plan, with the look and feel of a Chelsea art gallery. Through this process, Slimane seems intent on creating boutiques in which his vision for Celine can take fresh root, rather than slavishly following any perceived existing identity attached to the fashion house. “We arrive with our own stories, our own culture, a personal semantic that is different from the ones of houses in which we create,” said Slimane upon his appointment to Celine in 2018. “We have to be ourselves, against all odds.”
The artworks acquired by Celine are almost exclusively sculptural and draw from a material palette of solid wood, stone and metal composites. They exist as stand-alone volumes in the boutiques, rather than serving as accessories to the clothes. When walking up Mount Street in London, for instance, a towering column of reclaimed timber and metal by Canadian artist Lukas Geronimas – paired with a squatter, concrete volume by Norwegian artist Tiril Hasselknippe – are the first things you see in the store’s window. The works are beckoning you to stop and look, but they also create a sense of permanence within a window that would otherwise be used to display the season’s fashions. These artworks are installed in the boutiques, not just for a few months, but as part and parcel of the store experience, alongside carefully considered pieces of minimalist furniture, all of which have been designed or selected by Slimane. In Celine’s Paris rue de Grenelle outpost, the US artist Oscar Tuazon has re-cast part of the floor using steel, fir, oak and fibre concrete. It’s a definite, lasting mark in a space of transitory fashions.
In some senses, the project builds on an existing flirtation between fashion and art that blossomed throughout the 2010s. Summing up the trends of the previous 10 years as the decade came to an end, Guardian fashion writer Jess Cartner-Morley wrote that “the unspoken style ideal was to look like you worked in the art world.” Meanwhile, Vogue stalked global art fairs to snap fashionable women for their trend reports – the Frieze Art Fair even has its own tag on the magazine’s website. The French fashion brand Jacquemus commissioned Canadian artist Chloe Wise to paint its advertising campaign for spring 2019 and, in spring 2020, the Miu Miu advertising campaign features model Bella Hadid in the act of painterly creation, playing a feminised Jackson Pollock splashing colours onto a horizontal canvas. The two fields are comfortable bedfellows, lending each other a sense of what the other seems not to have: art gains a sense of cool and levity, along with a considerable cash injection; fashion acquires longevity and criticality.
This represents a relationship of commodification, undoubtedly, but the Celine Art Project is unusual for not exploiting art or artists as a point of inspiration or as a fleeting engagement for a season only; instead, it is collaborating with and investing in a group of artists who stand to benefit from their work being acquired by a permanent collection and displayed globally, in a publicly accessible context. Even if that context is the exclusive confines of a luxury-fashion store.
Words Johanna Agerman Ross
Photographs courtesy of Celine
This article was originally published in Disegno #26. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.