The Other Felix, Prince of Vuitton

Weird thing happened while processing Nicolas Ghesquière’s Louis Vuitton Cruise 2027 collection show at the Frick: I read the comments. If fashion week shows are still nominally for the industry, cruise/resort collection shows are for content and client service: spectacles presented in destinations to generate views and to reward high-value retail customers.

And so it was that LVMH’s YouTube livestream got almost 5 million views in two days. But not because it was advertised on a wraparound billboard at the Holland Tunnel. Like 90% of the first 200 comments were praising Felix, and thanking the True Prince of Vuitton for inviting them.

And because LVMH were speedrunning models through a museum in cringe Haring merchandise, I had one mononymical Felix in my mind—the art Felix—and didn’t even consider the KPop Felix—who didn’t even walk in the show, he just attended, and was barely visible for like five seconds, but who apparently sent a fifth of his 32 million Instagram followers to watch the show.

two copies of a getty images photo by arturo holmes of a model with shoulder length dark hair and olive skin strutting through the frick in a white silk tunic that looks like a bodega plastic bag of the kind that now costs five cents if you can find them, with a unaccountably cropped corner of a keith haring painting in purple with drips coming down, which he deliberately left unfinished, but which here is just the finished part, and on the right, the same thing with a stretched out pile of brightly multicolored candy wrapped in cellophane, a portrait by felix gonzalez torres of his parter ross, reimagined here as a christmas tree shaped field of swarovski crystals which, truth be told, would probably weigh a ton, dragging this waif to the ground
study for a worse idea, s/o @octavio-world. sorry to drag you into this, getty images’ arturo holmes

And for a moment, instead of a bodega bag-shaped silk tunic with Keith Haring’s dramatically self-elegiac Unfinished Painting on it, I envisioned a bodega bag-shaped silk tunic with Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) on it, maybe executed in a pile of shimmering Swarovski crystal candy pieces. In case you thought luxury spectacles in the capital of capital couldn’t get any more descrative. Click here to pre-order.