Johannesburg - There are three men, all dressed in black watching me. Given their refined people-watching skills they can probably guess I am not going to buy anything.
I could, if I wanted to forgo grocery shopping for a few months, but despite my love of beautiful fashion objects, I’m not willing to part with R8 000 for a pair of sunglasses or R30 000 for a handbag - even if it boasts the Louis Vuitton label. I am also not sure buying these designer objects is the point any more; there is something satisfying in studying pristine-looking objects I can never have. To possess them would rob me of this vicarious pleasure.
Stepping into the Louis Vuitton store at Sandton City is a bit like visiting the Louvre or the Tate Modern; there is so much mythology and status attached to the objects that just standing in proximity to them and being able to almost touch them generates an endorphin rush.
These vicarious shopping escapades never used to be available to South Africans. Or certainly not on the scale that they have become in recent years. Particularly since the opening of Luminance, a mini-Harrods, in Hyde Park Corner shopping centre or The Diamond Walk, a new wing at Sandton City that opened in May, which is lined with quasi-fashion museums like the Louis Vuitton store.
There is no mistaking you have entered a different sartorial stratosphere when you glide down this Diamond Walk - the corridor between the shops is wider - the façades of each store are taller, grander and longer - there are window-shopping displays but mostly you have to get inside to study the objects.
Completing the museum analogy at the Louis Vuitton store at the Diamond Walk is the fact that small items, like sunglasses, purses or clutch bags, are displayed under glass. Larger items are few and far between, driving home the fact these items are rare, collectable, sought-after and valuable.
The men in black - the security - also affirm this idea for, in reality, such tight security surely must be unnecessary - could they not just tag the items as is the case for valuable ones in other stores? Or is a plastic tag seen as gauche? It is not as if the store is full of customers and theft is easy. I am the only one in the Vuitton store. It’s like visiting the Joburg Art Gallery - you can hear your footsteps and the guards are your only company.
Like the gallery, or in the case of the soon-to-be-opened Museum of contemporary African Art (Zeitz Mocaa) in Cape Town, the façade of luxury shops is grand and the function, the nature of the contents are not always that visible from the exterior. Take the new Dior store in Seoul, Korea, designed by architect Christian de Portzamparc.
This six-storey structure is wrapped in large-scale white panels that appear like giant petals, reflecting Dior’s signature floral designs. A mirrored staircase inside is another architectural feature, bringing to mind the high-end salons during Paris’s fashion heyday. Inhabiting the building or the space presents an encounter with art, culture and status. It is then perhaps no coincidence the Hyde Park Corner shopping centre, which is a veritable hub for international fashion labels in Joburg, boasts architectural art installations, such as Willem Boshoff’s scripto-visual work, which adorns the skylights.
The Dolce and Gabbana store at Sandton City doesn’t boast any artworks, but the rambling maze of rooms are lined with thick, plush purple carpets and large black chandeliers hang from the ceiling, making the store a destination, like a luxury hotel almost. Completing the fantasy is a cleaner in a white and black chamber-maid outfit.
The Louis Vuitton House has really been pushing this line between commerce and art. Last year it opened a foundation designed by Frank Gehry, who is arguably the go-to-architect for museums - he designed the Guggenheim in Bilbao - and a few weeks ago it opened La Galerie where vintage and never-seen-before items produced by this label are enshrined in museum-like settings. The house itself was once inhabited by the titular Louis, affirming it as an historical/ museum setting and there is an archive too, where “artefacts” are stored in temperature-set rooms and cabinets you would find at the Wits Art Museum, where they keep indigenous material, like beaded aprons and pipes, which in a way is perhaps no different than an old pair of Vuitton shoes. Are societies in the West starting to objectify their own culture because they can no longer do it with other cultures?
Naturally, this move to release objects that were once pure commodities from their crass capitalist moorings is one way of upping the value, generating more sales and extending the mythology that ultimately drives brands. It is not as if these brands don’t deliver; Louis Vuitton items are covetable because they are well-made and will last - unlike most of the fly-by-night products we merrily consume and discard each season and which are only affordable because the makers at the bottom of the chain are exploited. The skewed ethics tied to consumption might be one of the drivers behind this fashion museum culture. But you can’t help wondering if some level of distortion is taking place in this shift that is pulling us deeper into the belly of consumerism?
In South Africa, we are slowly edging in this direction via local design; signalled by all these design fairs (Design Indaba, Guild and Sanlam Handmade Contemporary) and Zeitz Mocaa announced when it opens late next year it will present fashion exhibitions. This caused a frisson of anxiety among some in the art world, but it is in line with museum practice across the world, where fashion exhibitions are being used to make museums more “accessible” to the masses - fashion speaks to everyone because it is such a vital carrier of identity and is embedded in our daily existence.
Hence, exhibitions, such as the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty, which has travelled to major museums across the world and sold record numbers of tickets, are becoming vital parts of museum programming. This populist shift in museum practice could be having an impact on how we view coveted designer items and how they are displayed in shopping centres.
Of course, somewhere along the line these luxury shops must be generating sales too. I have a sense as I wander through the Louis Vuitton shop that the customers who shop there are so discreet they are invisible - sending assistants to make the purchases, or getting the store to open at midnight so they can peruse without the eyes of the men in black on their every move.
As for me, all my conscience might allow me to buy is a Louis Vuitton pen for R450, which I will probably never use and keep wrapped as if it is some treasure from a far-away kingdom.
Sunday Independent