Re-presentation Policies of the Fashion Industry

Introduction

On October 9, 2005, the luxury ready-to-wear and leather goods brand Louis Vuitton celebrated the opening of its new flagship store¹. For this occasion, contemporary artist Vanessa Beecroft designed an installation where lightly dressed young women posed on the boutique’s shelves and coexisted with the merchandise displayed in the same space. A few press articles consulted at the time cited the artist’s desire to sublimate “the violence of the brands that women usually suffer”²:

[a] mercantilist ambiguity: [...] under the impassive eye of the boss, Bernard Arnault, twenty frozen models dressed in thongs, their legs surrounded by a thin strip of leather, placed between two briefcases, their heads on a purse, composing a strange and disturbing living picture. A majority of them had brown skin, the others pale. The exact reproduction of the brand’s color code.³ (Author’s translation)

The mise en abyme of the commercial spectacle proposed by this installation posed at the same time, in my opinion, the question of the symbolic occupation of a non-commercial space,⁴ in this case artistic, by an exclusively commercial authority. Accused of violence – admittedly symbolic – fashion, its brands, its advertisers proceeded to recuperate, even divert (Debord and Wolman 1956, reprinted in Debord 2006, pp. 221–229), the said accusation by transforming it into a spectacle within their commercial space.

A few years later, in 2010, another merchandising scheme proposed by the fashion ...