The Louis Vuitton Foundation rises in a monumental tangle of curved glass from the trees of the Bois de Boulogne, a large park on Paris’ wealthy west end. Set amid reflecting pools, the billowing forms are meant to resemble a sailing ship, with its connotations of travel, exploration and discovery. They are also an overt reference to the curved glass domes of the Grand Palais, the vast display hall built next to the Champs-Élysées for the Universal Exhibition of 1900.
Frank Gehry’s design for the building stands in stark contrast to the century-old apartment buildings of the nearby neighborhoods. In that sense, it shares a proud lineage with other structures—the Eiffel Tower, the Pompidou Center, the Louvre pyramid—that have propelled proudly traditionalist Parisians toward the future.
But the foundation building has not been nearly as controversial as any of its predecessors: There was no outcry that its newfangled forms would be a blemish on the formal Parisian landscape. Perhaps the polarizing figure of the man behind it—Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH, the world’s biggest luxury goods maker—is controversy enough. Or perhaps it is a testament to how luxury brands, in the way they connect tradition with ambition and in how we expect them to serve up the unexpected, help to sugarcoat the sometimes bitter pill of progress.
Old Brand, New Business
Bernard Arnault has been the most visible force in the transformation of luxury over the past three decades. Having refocused the company founded by his grandfather from construction to real estate development, he acquired Christian Dior in 1984 as part of its bankrupt parent company. Three years later, Arnault’s company took a stake in the nascent LVMH Group—formed through a merger between Louis Vuitton and the Moët Hennessy wines and spirits consortium—of which he was appointed chairman in 1989. Today the Arnault family owns approximately 70 percent of Christian Dior, which in turn owns a controlling interest in LVMH.
That early consolidation of three pillars of French luxury provided the platform for Arnault’s expansive vision. He saw the potential for luxury brands to benefit from connecting their creativity to strategic management, more ambitious marketing and sectoral synergies. Arnault set about transforming Louis Vuitton, whose popularity was ailing due to poor distribution and licensing—and rampant trade in fakes of its iconic, monogrammed bags. It is now the cash cow cornerstone of his empire. He also launched a decades-long acquisition spree, buying up privately owned luxury brands such as Givenchy, Krug Champagne, Emilio Pucci, Fendi and Bulgari.
LVMH now owns some 70 of the world’s most prestigious brands, with revenues of €30 billion in 2014. They range from fashion and leather goods (such as Céline, Berluti and Donna Karan) and wines and spirits (Veuve Clicquot, Dom Pérignon, Belvedere vodka) to watches and jewelry (Tag Heuer, Chaumet, De Beers), fragrance and cosmetics (Guerlain, Acqua di Parma), retail (Sephora, Le Bon Marché), even yacht building (Feadship’s Royal Van Lent), media (Les Echos, Nowness) and hotels (Cheval Blanc).
In the process of building LVMH, Arnault has made both friends and foes—an inherent part of being a game-changer. But even among those critical of his ambitious business style and his unabashed appetite for growth (foreign to the French, for whom ambitieux is a slur, and foreign to the luxury sector, which is used to seeing itself as above the fray of vulgar commerce), many concede the value of what he has built.
Artistic Foundations
The Louis Vuitton Foundation has been described by Arnault and others in the familiar corporate philanthropy vernacular as a nonprofit that “gives back to the community.” On the one hand, it fulfills LVMH’s civic duty as a major business. On the other, it helps bolster the art and craftsmanship that give luxury brands their cachet. “The houses of the LVMH Group,” Arnault says, “have always thrived thanks to the excellence of their creations and have thus long contributed to an art de vivre steeped in the humanist tradition. Their success is deeply rooted in our artistic and cultural heritage. For many years I have sought to share this success with artists, creative talents, thinkers and the general public, especially young people.”
The roots of the foundation were laid almost in tandem with those of its corporate parent. In 1990, Arnault met with Jean-Paul Claverie, then counselor to the French minister of culture, Jack Lang. Claverie joined LVMH as Arnault’s adviser on corporate sponsorship a year later. “The idea of a foundation came up at my very first meeting with Bernard Arnault,” Claverie says. “In the course of the many conversations that followed, we discussed and developed the idea of a foundation implementing and giving permanent form to an artistic, cultural and educational program.” More than 40 sponsored exhibitions, books and artistic commissions followed.
With the arrival of Marc Jacobs as Louis Vuitton’s creative director in 1997, the pace of the brand’s collaboration with artists intensified. “Bob Wilson, Olafur Eliasson and Ugo Rondinone decorated Christmas display windows,” Arnault says, “while Marc Jacobs asked Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince and Yayoi Kusama to work directly on creations for Louis Vuitton.”
In 2001, Claverie took Arnault to Bilbao to see Frank Gehry’s design for the Guggenheim Museum. Arnault was awestruck. “How could someone imagine something so incredible?” was his reaction, recalls Claverie in an interview. Arnault and Gehry first met in December that year, though it would be another 13 years before the Louis Vuitton Foundation finally opened in October 2014.
Creative Passion
A luxury-branded art museum is nothing new, of course. The Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris recently celebrated its 30th anniversary. The similarly oriented Prada Foundation in Milan just turned 20. François Pinault, the founder of Kering and owner of Gucci along with more than a dozen other luxury brands, opened his collection to the public at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice a decade ago. That is to say nothing of the long history of luxury brand collaborations with and sponsorship of museum exhibitions, opera productions and ballet. The highbrow sensibilities of both art and luxury brands—and their overlapping customers—offer a perfect fit.
But the Louis Vuitton Foundation is less about art for art’s sake than about presenting its own perspective, one that connects the past to the future. “As a private institution, the foundation has the freedom to make original, deliberate choices,” Claverie says. “For example, Bernard Arnault could commission Frank Gehry to design the building without holding a public call for tender. This allows the foundation to commit to a point of view and forge an identity.”
According to its director, Suzanne Pagé, the foundation seeks “neither the objectivity nor the comprehensiveness expected of a public collection. It is passionate and attempts to share the shock and wonder generated by certain works whose ability to break rules reinvents our relationship to the world.” Rather than academic and encyclopedic, it means to be personal and exploratory.
Unlike a purely personal endeavor, however, the foundation strives for the professional, quasi-scientific, analytical rigor expected of an institution that serves the public. “This rigor reflects the culture of LVMH,” says Claverie, “and it has allowed us to work with the world’s best museums—MoMA, the Tate, the Hermitage, the Munch Museum, the Musée d’Orsay and others—from the very beginning.”
In its opening seasons, alongside works commissioned specifically for the building and rotating exhibitions drawn from the Foundation’s contemporary art collection, a show called “Keys to a Passion” gathered iconic artworks from leading museums around the world to showcase the link between artists of the past century and those of today. “A fundamental question posed by all the houses of the LVMH group,” Arnault says, is “in the ever-changing realm of creativity, isn’t looking at the past the most convincing way to welcome the most innovative new ideas?”
Shifting Values
With this, the Louis Vuitton Foundation seems to be suggesting a future vision of luxury just as luxury is entering a state of flux. The consolidation and growth of the luxury business has come at a cost to the image of luxury, a sector long associated with intimate scale and exclusivity. What was once hailed as the professionalization of the luxury business has come to be called an industrialization, a democratization, even “a vulgarization” as the growing luxury conglomerates—LVMH foremost among them, but also Kering, Richemont (the owners of Cartier) and Hermès—have absorbed legions of MBA graduates, management consultants and brand-marketing experts to scale and streamline their operations.
Recently, this has led to a backlash of sorts, with many luxury customers eschewing the more available, visible and popular brands for harder-to-find, confidential, niche makers. Sales at some of the most familiar powerhouses have been lackluster even while the luxury sector as a whole expands.
All of this comes at a time when the confluence of art and big money is raising questions of its own. London’s Frieze Art Fair, Paris’ Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, Art Stage Singapore, Art Basel and the New York spring auctions are now on the calendar of global events for the world’s ultrawealthy, alongside the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Cannes Film Festival, Royal Ascot and the global fashion weeks. Prices for contemporary art are hitting breathtaking heights: Christie’s sale of 75 pieces in New York last November brought in $853 million, setting price records for eleven artists.
This money culture, noted Camille Paglia in The Wall Street Journal, means that the art world now “suffers from a monolithic political orthodoxy—an upper-middle-class liberalism far from the fiery antiestablishment leftism of the 1960s.” Paglia also lamented the separation of artistic expression from “the manual trades, which share skills, methods and materials with artistic workmanship.”
This shift away from traditional production is apparent in luxury as well. As much as luxury customers may value the “Made in . . . ” label, some luxury production has quietly been shifting from France, Italy and other familiar manufacturing centers to Poland, Bulgaria and points east. Despite the vaunted value of craftsmanship, technical expertise can be taught anywhere. (Remember that many ancient Western luxuries were “Made in China.”) And with everything from high-end plumbing fixtures to entire mansions now being 3-D-printed, the primacy of handcrafted luxury itself may be in doubt.
As long as there are places and ways to get the same results for less, the old guard of luxury will not be competitive. With sufficient effort and investment, anyone can become the best in their category. Creativity, on the other hand, must be nurtured from within. And it is unbounded, artistic imagination that keeps luxury out of the ordinary. But to many, art, like luxury, is being suffocated by money. Both are victims of their own success.
The Luxe Arts
This critique ignores an essential, perhaps inconvenient truth about the relationship between art and luxury. While we like to believe in the purity of artistic expression, art has always been linked to big money—since before the Medici, since the pharaohs, at least.
Take a close look at the world’s great art museums and it soon becomes apparent that they are vast repositories of luxury goods. From ancient Egyptian funerary totems to illuminated manuscripts, royal portraits, silver tea services and haute couture gowns, museums are vast collections of products made for political, religious or commercial elites. Working under their patronage, highly skilled craftsmen invested creativity and emotion to make something that can impress those who merit or are used to the best. It is only the passage of time that converts these objects from high-grade consumer goods into art and cultural heritage.
Despite the focus on the material, real luxury is more about ideals than it is about things. Chanel No. 5 remains relevant, barely changed, a century after its creation. More than the mere extension of a fashion brand, from perfume to packaging, Coco Chanel drew inspiration from her cohort of avant-garde friends—Picasso, Cocteau, Stravinsky and so on—who were pushing aesthetic boundaries with controversial, new, abstract forms. Attuned to modernism, art deco and even dada, Chanel developed the first abstract scent of a woman, neither chastely floral nor sensually musky, but both: a complete being, to reflect her personal vision of emancipated womanhood.
And despite the focus on illustrious history, real luxury is about the future. Louis Vuitton, the man, the trunk maker, saw his purpose as revolutionizing “the art of travel.” He worked with designers, engineers and other innovators to change the way people thought about packing at a time when railroads and steam engines were making society more mobile. In privileged dialogue with its upper-class customers, the company had long sought to engage them intellectually and emotionally with forward-looking imagery. The essence of travel is forward motion, exploration and discovery of new places and of new aspects of oneself in the process.
In Search of Timelessness
If Bernard Arnault’s legacy is polarizing, it is only because, in a sense, he encapsulates our ambivalence toward luxury itself: drawn by its richness, yet at times scornful of its extravagance; reverential of disappearing skills, yet hungry for innovation. And in luxury’s new business model, the scrutiny of financial market analysts has been added to those of fashion editors, setting commercial, quality and creative imperatives at odds.
This is a complex challenge for brands whose very essence depends on balancing leadership with fantasy, heritage with novelty and profitability with the open-ended risk taking of creative experimentation.
The Louis Vuitton Foundation seems to acknowledge a new truth: If luxury is to continue to delight us with the unexpected, it must be about something more than opulence, more than tradition. In a world of material wealth, it must lead and incite rather than comfort. Luxury, real luxury, is always ahead of us. It is what we are unaccustomed to. So its future is whatever provides an antidote to the present.
Is today’s luxury tomorrow’s art? Only time will tell.