New French Luxury: Art, Fashion and the Re-Invention of a National Brand

Abstract

The language of luxury goods in the early twenty-first century increasingly resembles the language of art – terms such as “investment piece” or “limited edition” are now integrated into fashion discourse. Concentrated in the main French corporate holdings – LVMH and Kering, or in privately owned companies such as Hermès and Chanel – the global luxury fashion brands now invest heavily in the art market to expand their influence across a broad spectrum of the visual arts, cinema, design, and architecture, to create a new intersectional definition of luxury within the global creative industries. In this article, we examine a number of case studies of collaborations between the leading Paris fashion houses and contemporary artists to illustrate this phenomenon and we conclude by arguing that the globalization of the luxury economy and the commercial expansion of the French fashion houses (targeting the consumer economies of the BRICS and the Middle East) has seen the image of France revitalized across the globe.

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