“You can feel the ghosts,” Nicolas Ghesquière said of the Frick, which the House of Louis Vuitton rented and closed down for several days for the livestreamed presentation of the 2027 Cruise Collection. “Not just the art, but the furniture, the objects, the lifestyle.”
But also the art. And the objects.
Anachronistic holdovers for selling warm weather clothes to global northerners escaping winter, cruise collections now fill brand content gaps in the fashion industry’s seasonally oriented calendar. As Ghesquière explained on a Vogue podcast that somehow lasted an hour, cruise collections get dropped into a fancy locale and have a stronger narrative. In this case, that was robber baron-era Upper East Side and licensed merchandise.
Ghesquière’s inspiration [sic] was a 90-yo Vuitton leather suitcase “embellished” with two Keith Haring figures and a date, 1984, which The House bought at Bonham’s Los Angeles in May 2020. The suitcase came from Dominick Bonanno Batty, who Bonhams described as, “a former roommate of Keith Haring and [who] was introduced to the present owner of the suitcase by the late Alexis Arquette.”
Arquette died in 2016. Batty is an internet ghost who only appears in the provenance of this suitcase and a second unsigned, Haring-embellished object, a c.1980 subway sign, which sold at Bonhams in 2022. He is not the person most frequently described as Haring’s roommate: Kenny Scharf.
The suitcase has a partial sheet of blank letterhead attached to the back from Fun Gallery, a St Mark’s Place pioneer of street art exhibition. [A Haring sketch on similar letterhead did not sell at Swann in 2023.] In 2011 Fun co-founder Patti Astor and Fab 5 Freddy gave a brief oral history of Fun to Jeffrey Deitch for Art in the Streets at MOCA. Deitch turned up at Fun’s first show, in Astor’s apartment, Haring had a show at Fun in 1983, and frankly this suitcase would’ve stood out as weirdly subdued.
I’m sure it’s real, though. If it weren’t, could it have inspired this?
or this?
If it weren’t real, would LVMH have put the suitcase on a giant billboard at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel? Presumably, they were able to authenticate the suitcase, if not the Haring.
Even more than the billboard, it’s the ghost of Haring’s Unfinished Painting (1989), cleaned up, cropped, and printed on silk that really got @octavio-world’s goat. Weirdly, while there are wire service stills, this is the only glimpse of it in the frenetically edited video. The inverted box pleats on these Haring tops feel like plastic shopping bags stuck together at a self-checkout, maybe not the lifestyle Ghesquière was going for.
Or is it? Thanks to Artestar’s decades of relentless licensing, seeing Haring imagery on merch instantly reads as mass pop schlock, a form of artwashing that invariably makes the product it’s been slapped on feel cheaper. Maybe this is LVMH’s plan, to meet their target customers where they are. Maybe $4,000 silk blouses that look like Uniqlo t-shirts are next-level quiet luxury, all but invisible to the mob assembling outside the gates?
Previously, LVMH related: Off-White Basquiat discovered in underground evening sale; Kusama X Vuitton; The Infinity Room is now an LVMH Pop-up