The Incredible, Escalating Resort Game.
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The Louis Vuitton Cruise 2016 collection, shown in Palm Springs, Calif. This year it will be in Rio de Janeiro.
The endless game of fashion show one-upmanship continues. On Sunday, Nicolas Ghesquière
unveiled — via Instagram — the venue for the next Louis Vuitton Cruise
show, to be held on May 28 outside Rio de Janeiro, in the run-up to the
Olympics: the Niterói Contemporary Art Museum, designed by Oscar Niemeyer.
The
swirling, saucer-shaped museum is one of the area’s landmark buildings.
Though rumors had swirled that the show might be canceled (or moved)
because of the Zika virus, the brand has instead doubled-down on its
commitment on the area and the opportunity the Brazilian market and the
Olympic association both present.
It’s
pretty impressive, but consider that Dior Cruise is being held in
Blenheim Palace in England, Gucci in Westminster Abbey in London, and
Chanel in Havana (specific location to be announced), and you can
understand why Vuitton chose to take a gold-medal position rather than
to retreat. And get ready for what is going to be a month of
image-making and power plays among the major European fashion brands.
The
goal is to position themselves as the royalty of the industry:
authorities not just on clothes, but on all related aspects of design
and lifestyle and on sucking you, the fashion buyer or the fashion
viewer, ever deeper into their orbits.
It
is also, however, indicative of a widening gulf between brands that
believe shows are becoming entertainment, and those that believe they
are at risk of overexposure, with its resulting consumer boredom
backlash. Over the last few seasons, brands such as Céline and Proenza
Schouler have pulled back, presenting their Resort collections in their
showrooms but banning photos or social media reports until the clothes
are in stores, while the Cruise shows of these four brands have become
ever more elaborate and far-flung, the better to dazzle consumers both
in person and on the web. They are fashion’s equivalent of the 1
percent.
In
May, Dior took its Cruise to Le Palais Bulles, Pierre Cardin’s
space-age architectural marvel in the South of France, which followed an extravaganza at the Brooklyn Navy Yard the year before. Vuitton was
at the Bob and Dolores Hope estate in Palm Springs, Calif., which
followed a 2014 event at the Place du Palais de Monaco in Monte Carlo in
front of the royal family. And Chanel was in Seoul, South Korea, after
Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, in 2014.
You do the map.
The
money involved is, of course, enormous. Aside from the rentals of such
space, models and clothes are imported, sets are built and parties are
held. The show is effectively the cherry on top of a few days of
cultural and consumer experience, courtesy of a company. But presumably
the effort is worth it, both as a fertile source of content creation for
a number of digital platforms (livestream! and Instagram! and Snapchat!
and so on), and as direct-to-shopper outreach.
And,
because the pre-collections — of which Cruise, or Resort, is one — are
in stores longer than the official fall or spring runway collections,
and they comprise a majority of a brand’s seasonal sales, it makes a
certain amount of sense to invest in them.
Once,
at a lunch, I sat next to the woman in charge of a group of Dior’s
V.I.P. shoppers — customers who are treated to the Cruise show by the
brand, wined, dined and massaged — and she said that the expense of
bringing them to the show and showing them a good time was more than
offset by the amount of shopping they did to outfit themselves for the
event.
Still,
it’s hard not to wonder if Vuitton, Dior, et. al., are not creating
their own set of very special problems by escalating their Cruise shows
to this extent. After all, how do you top an Olympic year? A royal
palace? What happens next?
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