LITMIR.BIZ

      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 industry caught my attention. The Website of the ready-to-wear brand Zara published the making of its advertising campaign, while the same year⁵, the title Vogue Paris offered its subscribers DVDs qualified as bonus gifts presenting behind-the-scenes photo shoots organized by the magazine as part of its fashion and beauty editorials. I noted tension between the promise of the “communication contract” (Charaudeau 1983) that the “making of” format is supposed to carry and what the audiovisual content produced by Zara and Vogue Paris staged. From the object likely to show the conditions of conception, enunciation and production of a film, the “making of” of its two fashion actors – the advertiser and media authority – was transformed into a new advertising discourse. Proposed as an object that made the invisible visible, the “making of” and its derivatives, such as backstage, or behind the scenes only intensified the spectacle deployed by this industry (Mouratidou 2010, pp. 105–124).

      Four years later, the French haute couture and luxury ready-to-wear brand Chanel unveiled its spring-summer 2015 collection at the Grand Palais, in the form of a street event⁶. The staging of this communication event was presented as “we can match the machos”⁷ and suggested “the wind of freedom” that blew in May 1968 in France was here again⁸. Between 2006 and 2011, another brand in the luxury industry, Yves Saint Laurent,⁹ offered its advertising campaign in the form of a leaflet distributed in the streets of major cities, including Paris. As for the examples previously cited, the strategy mentioned here was a generic hybridization and a confused staging where the limits between the communication and marketing policy and the artistic (Louis Vuitton and Vanessa Beecroft), film-based (making of, backstage) or, in the case of the last two examples, political claim and citizen movement seemed opaque. I noticed then that the fashion industry’s commercial strategies were supported and sometimes even appropriated forms resulting from citizen mobilizations

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