Sunday, October 26, 2014

Louis Vuitton Elevates its Art with Gehry-Designed Museum Opening

Louis Vuitton can't get enough of architect Frank Gehry. The 85-year-old just designed a bag for the company’s high-end “Six Iconoclasts, One Icon” collection. Now, the art center in Paris he designed for the luxury fashion brand's parent company will open to the public on October 27, following a VIP preview that saw LVMH CEO Bernard Arnault take the prime minister of France and other dignitaries on a private tour.
The Independent calls Gehry’s new Fondation Louis Vuitton in the Jardin d'Acclimatation, which will house LVMH’s massive art collection and sits on public land, as being “crazy and tender.” The paper goes on to note that this is “biggest privately funded arts project in Paris for decades.” The Guardian reports that the building took ten years to create, with 3,000 workers and mroe than 100 engineers, and is set to become the possession of Paris in 2062. 
While other luxury houses have opened the doors to their foundations' art collections, includingPrada and (by invitation only) Hermès, Gehry made sure to take the opportunity to continue to experiment, just as he has since getting started in the business back in 1962.
“Anything overly finished is static to me,” he said, according to the Independent. “It's not living. It's not open to interpretation. We made the building ephemeral, like a big sculpture. It's floating and changing. It looks like it's growing. No matter what you do with a normal building, it's a static building. This one isn't."
Meanwhile, LVMH has now made it public how it plans to dole out the $7.4 billion worth of stock in its competitor Hermès that it has been building up for four years and made a deal about last month to partially divest, Bloomberg reports. Each LVMH stockholder will receive two shares of Hermès stock for every 41 LVMH shares they have to do with what they please. LVMH will retain an 8.5 percent stake in Hermes.

Source: http://www.brandchannel.com/

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