Walk through the downtown of any major world city, and you’ll see the intersection
of fashion and status carried on women’s shoulders or stacked like oranges in
the corners of stores by Louis Vuitton, Prada, Gucci, Hermes, Bottega Veneta,
Fendi, Christian Dior, Valentino, and Yves Saint Laurent—handbags with prices
ranging between $1000 and $10,000 each.
America hasn’t known rationing since World War II, but Bergdorf Goodman and Saks
Fifth Avenue both recently restricted purchases of the popular Yves Saint Laurent
Downtown bag to three per customer. Similarly, the Louis Vuitton website limits
online purchases to two of each style per customer, per calendar year.
With the American dollar weak, Europeans and Asians are flying in for deals and
designers are worried about undercutting themselves, much as in 2000 and 2001
Gucci, Hermès and Vuitton shops in Paris put bag limits on Asian shoppers, leading
to surreal scenes of Asian customers on the Champs-Élysées soliciting Western
tourists to buy bags for them. And with American handbag sales growth slowing
this year (perhaps there’s no more room in those New York closets), the handbag
phenomenon has not only become world wide, it is now fuelled by growth in emerging-market
countries.
Handbags are weird, almost mystical. There are hundreds of websites devoted to
bags, that treat the bags themselves as living celebrities, and they have some
of the highest drooling density on the internet. On thebagforum.com, for example,
there are 606 active threads devoted to Louis Vuitton bags, nearly ten thousand
posts just about this one bag designer, with an average incidence of 0.837 “oh
my god” or “to die for” comments per posting. The website is set up so you first
introduce yourself, then “show off your bag,” then write OMG or TDF about someone
else’s bag.
And it’s not just quantity. A few years ago, the Boston fashion press reported
that Elizabeth Hurley had been seen club-hopping around London with a Che-embroidered
Louis Vuitton bag. She may well have been under contract to be seen with that
bag, but one has to ask: Che on a designer handbag? Sure, Che was an interesting
guy, sure Alberto Korda’s iconic picture of him was called “the most famous photograph
in the world” by the Maryland Institute of Art, but whether you love him or hate
him, Che just doesn’t make sense on a Vuitton bag. Fans would point out that he
was a Marxist fundamentally opposed to the fetishization of commodities. Detractors
would mention that at La Cabana he executed several thousand of exactly the sort
of people who’d be most likely to shell out several thousand for a handbag. Lawyers
would point out that Korda was never paid for the intellectual property rights
of the photograph. And even those who are neither fans, nor detractors, nor lawyers,
who simply admire his picture as a countercultural symbol, must get a bit of cognitive
dissonance when that symbol is on the most bourgeois of bags. No?
But instead of being slowed down by this sort of dissonance, handbag designers
have used it to fight off staleness in brands available on every streetcorner.
Once this was done through Hollywood stars, but as those sorts of endorsements
have become too common, designers have sought out new territory. “To be perceived
as cutting edge, designers must make use of a different kind of celebrity,” says
Elizabeth Currid, author of The Warhol Economy: How Fashion, Art and Music Drive New York City. “They need an art star.”
Accordingly, they have sought to blend brands with artists like Eliasson, Sprouse,
Wilson, Beecroft, Murakami and Richard Prince (for Vuitton), Koons and Sachs (Fendi),
Hirst (Levis and shoe designer Manolo Blahnik), Tracey Emin (Longchamp) and many
others. And in the jungle of all these brands, Louis Vuitton stands out as a genius
of the modern world, the 500-pound gorilla of handbags, combining designs that
are both timeless and edgy with a nearly prescient sense of the international
flow of image and information.
Olafur Eliasson kept out of the bags themselves, designing centerpieces for Vuitton’s
Christmas shop-windows, lamps shaped like an eye looking back out at the customer
with a mirror in the center, with the promise to “put the consumer in the spotlight.”
Somehow Eliasson seems a fitting collaboration—his work is always beautiful and
always bland, the sort of artist that the wives of hedge fund managers can appreciate.
...read more on C-Arts Magazine (ISSUE#05)
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C-ARTS VOLUME-05
There is a new epidemic trend in the contemporary art of Asia sweeping through the population of younger artists: Animamix Art.
From different generations and cultural backgrounds, S Teddy D and Daniel Flanagan present together their collaboration on Transubstantiation.
Not unlike other Filipino-Americans who journey to the Philippines to learn more about their roots, Hanna Pettyjohn undertook such a passage in reverse.
Ong-Arj’s painting has point out thoroughly content in a society condition today. Even it express through looks weird human image.
Fazar paints with his heart. He believes that his interpretation is like “worship”. Any composition existing in his painting is his effort of concretizing what he feels.
With great imagination, he has been using a very unique artistic language to express his very much primitive and strong emotion on the surrounding characters.
In Ardana’s works garlic becomes most artistic in various ways it is rendered whether it is presented individually or in groups of bulbs, cut open, blown up, its thin and transparent layers peeled, as well as severed and torn.
Hui Xin’s art addresses both the phenomenon of our constant need for visual stimuli, as well as our desire to be surrounded by objects that give us pleasure. His new paintings and sculptures bring out a dichotomy between naive happiness and adult-themed amusements.
Selected Solo Exhibition
He got The Special Award From The 25th Exhibition of Contemporary art in 2008 and winner Prize from 11th Panasonic Contemporary Painting Competition when he postgraduate.
The inspiration behind his recent paintings came in 2005 while he was observing his second child was a son. People say that when babies sleep they are guarded by angels. This common experience evoked a wave of questions: Was the baby dreaming? What was he dreaming about? What was he feeling?
“Many artists like to ponder on the past and the present through the history of human civilization,” says young artist Wang Mian. “With pieces of information and inspiration they
