It’s an age old recipe for success.
Naked skin and lots of it - but not necessarily the sort of skin you might expect to find at that Parisian purveyor of luxury luggage and handbags, Louis Vuitton.
The world has become accustomed to Vuitton’s initial-branded signature luggage, but this time, the naked skin is Art, with a capital A.
For Louis Vuitton’s recently opened emporium in Paris is now not just a consumer temple but, from Thursday, boasts a chic art gallery on the seventh floor that will be open to the public.
The Espace Louis Vuitton is a separate space for contemporary art and culture.
Is it art?
But just how separate or independent can that art be when it is commissioned by a commercial patron such as this powerful global brand?
Very independent, according to Yves Carcelle, the chairman and CEO of Louis Vuitton Malletier.
“We thought it was important to give the space we have here another dimension; to commission works of art to enable a very wide public to have contact with modern art.”
Even the shop downstairs incorporates some bold works, such as the video wall by James Turrell, an American artist whose main medium is light.
“We don’t want to limit ourselves,” says Mr Carcelle.
“The artists were totally free in their work. The main difference between art and creativity in fashion is that in fashion you need to be able to sell the product. Art works only if you give it total freedom.”
Even the lifts up to the exhibition space are a work of art: “sensory deprivation lifts” by artist Olafur Eliasson - whose sun-like installation at the Tate Modern, The Weather Project, was in complete contrast to this.
In the lifts, all light and sound is totally blacked out, leaving visitors with the eerie feeling of being quite literally unsure whether they’re going up or down. Claustrophobics beware.
Yet on emerging from the pitch-black lift at the purely “art” exhibition upstairs, it is hard to escape the Louis Vuitton branding as you gaze at the 13 photographs that make up Alphabet Concept, by New York photographer Vanessa Beecroft.
The striking images show female nudes: models seemingly chosen for their starkly dark or luminously white skin, wearing clown-like coloured wigs on their heads.
Their bodies are intertwined to shape the letters of Louis Vuitton’s name.
Beecroft’s live performance work, which was created for the grand opening of the shop last October, also forms part of the display, with video and further photos.
Curled around the logoed suitcases and the handbags in the atrium, are similar G-string-clad models - this time, almost naked apart from their Louis Vuitton shoes.
The installation was one of the highlights of the extravagant, celeb-studded opening night, which attracted crowds of excited Parisians on the Champs Elysees eager to catch a glimpse of the guests, who ranged from Winona Ryder to Karl Lagerfeld.
They, needless to say, kept their clothes on.
In fashion
It seems that one’s own space for art and culture is the latest must-have accessory for French luxury firms.
Cartier already has its own exhibition space in Paris at the Fondation Cartier, which memorably gave space to designer Jean-Paul Gautier, who filled the room with intricate designer dresses - made using real baguettes.
So what do the fashionistas and opinion formers make of this trend?
“It’s a very good idea,” says Isabelle Musnik, editor of the style magazine Influencia.
“The Louis Vuitton brand has been very present in all artistic domains, so the link between contemporary art and LV is a logical one. The company has always moved with the times, and “porno chic” - the naked models draped around handbags - is a French speciality.
“French luxury marques have always tended towards nudity and provocation, perhaps more than art on a traditional sense.”
Yet all this talk of art provokes the age-old question. If it’s paid for by a commercial company - is it really art?
Or is it also designed to sell more handbags, not least to the groups of Japanese tourists who flock to the store to worship at the altar of the logoed luggage?
“Sell more handbags? Yes, that’s my dream,” says Yves Carcelle with a disarming smile.
Meanwhile, one guest at the official opening points out that even the ceiling of the Sistine chapel had to be commissioned by wealthy patrons.
And while not quite the Sistine chapel, if art isn’t your thing, there is still a fabulous view over the Champs Elysees from the seventh floor gallery.
Adverts featuring naked models in sexual poses cause occasional red faces. But a poster of a seven-year-old smoking is banned. In an era of uncertainty, what is now taboo?
Centuries-old painted cherubs of the Renaissance are valid art, but the Saatchi Gallery’s decision to show Tierney Gearon’s “holiday snaps” of her naked children is seized upon with relish by a moral panic-fuelled tabloid press.
The Taleban in Afghanistan earn the ire of the West for destroying statues, including the giant Bamiyan Buddhas.
Saudi Arabia has routinely banned taboo images, memorably censoring an album cover of Welsh rock band Stereophonics because it featured young couples kissing.
In Israel, the performance of Wagner’s music, still associated with Nazis, is so taboo that the Rishon Lezion Symphony Orchestra needed permission from the country’s supreme court to perform the composer’s work last year.
But in the UK tabloids, taboo means one thing - sex.
Images of nudity, and increasingly those of children, are causing ever-growing levels of establishment hand-wringing and soul-searching.
Classic taboo
Artist and critic Edward Lucie-Smith says the heightening of concern over paedophilia and simultaneous increase of depictions of adult nudity has changed what is taboo.
“In the 19th century, the depiction of pre-pubescent children was generally regarded as a depiction of innocence with no suggestion that there was a sexual element.
“In the days of hippies and flower power there were lots of pictures of hippy fathers dangling naked children on their knee - nobody thought anything of it.
“One could say that the structure of taboos is in the process of being inverted.”
Author John Mortimer has seen society’s sense of taboos shift since he was a junior counsel in the infamous Oz trial of 1971 where the conviction, overturned on appeal, of those behind the counterculture magazine became a cause celebre.
He told BBC News Online that even in the absence of high-profile obscenity trials, political correctness had led to a puritan Britain with as many taboos as ever.
Renaissance paintings
“We are living in a dreary puritan country - we are marching relatively backwards.”
“Naked children, running around or flying, have been in every Renaissance painting.”
Mr Mortimer said our sense of what is taboo and what is decent was not determined reasonably but tailored for a minority.
“It is part of this great desire for control of people’s lives.
“Censorship has been good for artists because it puts them on their mettle to defy it.
Codes of conduct
“There is an idea that people should never be shocked - but no healthy person lives a day without being offended. It is not very healthy.”
Professor Graham Clarke, a specialist in photographic art at Kent University, says a taboo “can be as much to do with a nude photograph or somebody who has no legs, anything that disturbs or questions is taboo - taboo really becomes the things you don’t want to see”.
Mr Lucie-Smith agrees there is an ebb and flow of taboo in UK society.
Growth of psychoanalysis
“The line swings back and forth - some things become more permissible, some things less and it isn’t a linear progression.
“Our ideas about the intention of pictures of naked children have been influenced and one might say corrupted by the growth of psychoanalysis and its emphasis on child sexuality, by a loss of innocence.”
He points to the numerous examples of nudity in religious art through the ages.
But it is not only art that flirts with taboos with Sophie Dahl’s nude pose for Opium perfume and a London Underground poster featuring a seven-year-old Martin Amis smoking both banned.
Public anxiety
John Beyer, director of Mediawatch, formerly the National Viewers and Listeners Association, insists people have a right to be protected and to protect children.
“There is a great deal of public anxiety about exploitation of children and the sexual abuse of children.”
He says the lack of enforcement of obscenity laws has led to other taboos being dropped out of a sense of powerlessness, adding: “In some ways the public have been more tolerant out of a sense of frustration that nothing can be done.”
Prof Clarke points to Benetton’s famous newborn baby poster campaign of 1991, one of the most complained about in the history of advertising, with 800 people finding it offensive.
“It was one of the most natural things one could see - a newborn baby which hasn’t been washed, a completely innocent, celebratory image and yet people objected.
“In general, it is a matter of whether the child is being exploited … if the obvious intention is to use the body rather than reflect the child, its sense of joy, happiness or sadness … when the body becomes treated as an object.”
