To the casual observer or perhaps someone who hasn’t had an eye exam in a while, that phantasm of white may look like the humpback whale of automobiles, the Cadillac Escalade, being towed away for a parking violation. From this angle it may even seem as if the Hong Kong police had to call in a crane to help with removal of the gas guzzler, but, upon closer examination, that’s actually the Chanel Mobile Art Container being erected on top of the Star Ferry parking lot.
Hong Kong is a city that has an avaricious appetite for designer goods. Just to take a quick snapshot of the luxury brand industry, Hermes has seven stores here whereas other fashion forward counterparts like Paris and New York, excluding holdings at Charles De Gaulle and JFK airports, only have 4 and 2 stores respectively. If Oprah shopped here, she most definitely would have found an open Hermes store somewhere in the city as Hong Kong’s love for luxe runs deep. As such, Karl Lagerfield’s vision of Chanel could not have picked a better first stop on its two-year world tour. The exhibition will be open to the public starting February 27 and will run until April 5. Curated by Fabrice Bousteau and housed in a collapsible museum designed by Zaha Hadid, the Chanel Mobile Art Container brings together 20 artists from all corners of the world who re-interpret le grande dame’s signature quilt bag first introduced in 1955. Some artists included on this list of the chosen few are Sophie Calle, Michael Lin, Sylvie Fleury, Blue Noses and Yoko Ono. Yes, that Yoko. I’ll leave the cheap shots out for now. To help spur their creativity, the artists were given a tour of Coco Chanel’s Paris apartment, rue Cambon, and were privy to study the environment of the studio in Vernil where the bags were handmade. This interesting endeavor is but one of the fruits of Uncle Karl’s tenure as creative director for Chanel. According to he of the ponytail, “We could have inundated the world with ads, but it is a more noble project.” Oh, Uncle Karl, how right you are.
Image: Thanks, Pitfield.
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