Those Vuitton Bags and Richard Prince

Felix Salmon took issue with my dismissal of the bags Louis Vuitton showed in collaboration with artist Richard Prince. Felix seems to think that because Prince is a good artist -- better, he thinks, than the ones that have collaborated with Vuitton in the past --and that the bags are cheeky that they'll bring Vuitton the kind of heat and buzz a brand needs to stay hip. He says:

Me? I kinda love it. Eliasson is a blandly corporate artist who specializes in making beautiful objects: he fits right in to Vuitton shop windows. Beecroft is an Italian fashionista extraordinaire whose imprimatur is much sought-after by fashion houses. Sprouse and Murakami are self-promoters who jumped at the opportunity to burnish their own brands by advertising themselves all over Vuitton handbags. But Prince? Prince is edgier, and more subversive. And in that sense he has a very similar attitude to that of Marc Jacobs back in his grunge days.

I said that the gimmick of making bags that deliberately look like Chinese fakes could easily backfire when in-the-know fashionistas simply go and buy the fakes -- taking the Vuitton in-joke one further. Felix said this didn't bother him either.

In a way, Lauren has put her finger on exactly why this collection might be much more interesting than the average handbag line: it takes aim at a crucial support of the entire fashion industry, the distinction between real and fake. In some ways, the fake Richard Prince bags will be more real than the genuine ones, which can after all only ever pretend to be fake. This is of course very troubling for the fashion industry - that's the whole point. So congratulations to Marc Jacobs and Richard Prince for knocking the fashionistas a little off kilter. In the grand scheme of things, it will only help to improve Jacobs's iconoclastic reputation, and the fashion world will start to enjoy the frisson it received last night. So, as in any good fairy tale, everybody wins in the end. Even the Chinese counterfeiters.

So then I wrote a nice little comment to Felix pointing out that fashion isn't art. The point of these bags is not to stimulate conversation about the legitimacy of the brand or to pass comment on the existence of fakes. Ok, maybe from Prince's point of view that was the point, but from Vuitton's point these bags have to sell. And even Prince's message will lose impact if they only sit in shop windows for a season. I should also have pointed out that he is vastly underestimating the fashionista when he congratulates Prince and Jacobs for "knocking the fashionistas a little off kilter." Fashionistas -- and perhaps the problem is the term -- are some of the most culturally aware people on the planet. Jacobs is just one of the designers who has a vast art collection. Very few editors at the show were not familiar with Prince's work. We were not shocked by the text on the bags, nor the myriad of colors, nor the tinkering of the logo -- but some of us were shocked by the idea that the executives at Vuitton would let Jacobs show such a ramshackle collection -- but that doesn't mean that we don't get the joke. Felix responded with another post saying that these bags were the equivalent of haute couture gowns -- designed to build buzz more than sales. Here he is also wrong.

...launching an avant-garde handbag line which nobody wants to buy can actually bolster the reputation, and therefore the value, of the brand.... The interesting thing about the Richard Prince handbags is that until now, fashion houses have jealously prevented their cash cows - the handbag lines - from venturing too far into the realm of the outre. After all, if no one buys an unwearable dress, that's fine, it wasn't designed to make money. But if no one buys an ugly handbag, then that's real potential profits down the drain....

Although Felix mentions the Sprouse and Murakami collaborations, he ignores the gigantic point that those bags did everything the Prince bags did in terms of shaking up the staid reputation of Vuitton, but the sold in vast, vast quantities. The idea of using an artist to rethink a brand has been done. By Vuitton. And was done better by Vuitton. The Murakami collaboration in particular was a gigantic success, bringing in in $300 million the year it launched, 2003. It is the clothes on the Vuitton runway that management knows will never sell. They do want to sell those bags. They know that there's a fashion forward customer who may travel with Vuitton luggage or even a dog carrier, but would never be caught dead with a traditional brown Vuitton bag. And seeing chic people on the street with the artist collaborations brings customers into the stores who may buy the traditional small leather goods. Simply having them in shop windows is not enough. So how am I so sure that these bags don't have the same buzz? 1. The Press Gift. These bags were delivered to the hotels of the top editors on Friday afternoon. I saw nobody with one at the McQueen show that night. On Saturday, I saw Roberta Meyers, the editor of Elle with one and no one else. On Sunday, show day, I saw Jess-Carter Morely from the Guardian with one and no one else. On Monday, the stylist for Vuitton, Katie Grand was the only person I saw carrying one. (And she told me that she had been the one to choose which gift went to the press, so sorry Katie.) When Prada gave its bowling style bags to editors a few years ago, every single one of them had one on her arms within moments. They had their photo taken going into the shows with them. They took them back to New York, Milan and Paris and showed them to their friends. And that is how buzz is begins. 2. When the Murakami collection was shown, there was a frisson of excitement at the show, much in the same way there was at this season's Lanvin show. Everybody knew instantly that the Murakami collection would be a hit. The bags were great, and the clothes were also great. It all worked together. This show didn't work, and this is what I meant when I said it was going too far from Vuitton's roots. Even reviewers who liked the bags said as much. Therefore, less buzz in print. It's not all rave, rave, rave. 3. Within days of seeing the Murakami collection I was flooded with emails from friends asking my help in procuring one. This season, nothing so far. So I reached out to one of them, a very stylish New York based H.F.W. (Hedge Fund Wife), and asked her to look online and tell me what she thought. This is what she said, clearly having forgotten her request for the Murakami:

I have seen a few new bags, but I am not sure which bag you are talking about -- is it the one that has the writing on it or the suede/patent ones?Personally, I have never been a huge fan of wearing the LV on anything. I have one of the LV bags and they are really heavy and "West Palmy." Personally, I don't really care for any of the LV bags."

This illustrates a two key points. 1. The collection was confusing. 2. It didn't change her opinion of Vuitton. Felix summed up by saying:

Vuitton is in a difficult position: it's on every street corner in Japan, which means that it's the dominant behemoth whose market share all the other brands want to eat into. The worst thing it can do, in such a context, is allow itself to get stale: it has to be ahead of the curve, in order to keep its entire inventory desirable. The Prince bags serve that purpose: so long as Vuitton is putting out stuff like that, no one is going to consider the brand to be passe.

And I will argue the opposite. For many a "fashionista" this trying-to-hard collaboration didn't achieve anything that the previous collaborations hadn't done better. In fact it made one, me, think that the whole idea of artist collaborations was getting stale. Will they sell some of these bags? Of course. But will this collaboration have the same impact as the ones that came before? I still say no ...

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