Vestoj and Style Zeitgeist have teamed up in a dialogue and series of critiques of recent events in fashion media to raise more wide-reaching questions about the state of contemporary fashion media – and what that says about our industry at large. In the third instalment, we examine the notion of transparency, and how four different publishing platforms are dealing with the issue in relation to their respective funding models.

LOUIS VUITTON’S RECENT 2017 resort collection was presented last month at the Oscar Niemeyer-designed Niterói Contemporary Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The modernist building’s curvaceous ramp, set against a spectacular mountainous bay, was an ambitious venue that made for a photogenic catwalk locale, though its opulence, for some, jarred with the country’s current political and economic uncertainty.

Coverage delivered in the form of reviews and photo-ops ensured that the cost of its staging – from the elaborate set, to the flying in of overseas press, buyers and celebrities – was money well spent. This came via the typical set of high traffic fashion platforms like Vogue.com, T Magazine, High Snobiety and WWD, ensuring the event was thoroughly and successfully documented.

Within this slew of articles, The Business of Fashion weighed in with a piece that recorded the event by mostly addressing its economic and political significance. Against a backdrop of the otherwise mostly frivolous coverage, BoF attempted a more analytical, and much welcome, perspective of the event. However, more thought provoking was a short statement at the end of the article stating LVMH’s investment in the platform. It read:

‘Disclosure: LVMH, which owns Louis Vuitton, is part of a group of investors who, together, hold a minority interest in The Business of Fashion. All investors have signed shareholder’s documentation guaranteeing BoF’s complete editorial independence. Lauren Sherman travelled to Rio de Janeiro as a guest of Louis Vuitton.’

The statement appears to be an attempt to reassure readers of the publisher’s candour, and their dedication to deliver unbiased and reliable coverage of the event despite the apparent relationship between host and guest. The gesture reflected a transparency rarely seen in the murky realm of fashion publishing.

Other publications have not gone so far as this. The fashion and lifestyle platform Nowness,¹ that has Dazed & Confused’s Jefferson Hack as creative director, is also funded by LVMH. Though editorially very different to The Business of Fashion, there is no mention of the funding from the luxury group anywhere on the site. Instead, this information is found only through a general internet search, or on the LVMH website.²

‘Nowness has built the influence and authority to genuinely curate and shape the future of cultural conversations, and goes beyond just delivering experiences. We provide solutions to the industry by creating bespoke content for premium brands looking to reach our premium audience. Nowness is truly an innovator.’

– Jefferson Hack, creative director at Nowness, as featured on lvmh.com 

When Nowness was launched in 2010, an article by The Guardian responded with a brief, but apt blog post shortly after, highlighting the project as one that, ‘promises to blur the lines between editorial and promotional content in a “beautiful” way.’³ Back then Nowness was one of the first of its kind in the digital realm, but the site has since become emblematic in the landscape of fashion publishing where sponsorships are often shadowy terrain, particularly concerning the agenda an investor might have. Though the funding model adopted by Nowness allows the platform to remain advertising-free, issues arise around selectivity and what is chosen to be featured as published content. For example, Nowness often releases exclusive features, such as collection videos, made by Louis Vuitton and other brands within the LVMH group.

The Talks,⁴ an online interview platform created and funded by Rolex, reflects another editorial venture for a luxury company. The website aspires to cultural capital with editorial featuring interviews with high profile figures from art, film and fashion – similar to earlier incarnations like United Colors of Benetton’s Colors or Acne’s Acne Paper. Unlike Nowness, The Talks’ website reveals its economic framework immediately and explicitly with the Rolex logo on the right-hand of the website’s banner, relying on this separation with the editorial as a brand-building exercise for Rolex. Within the industry, marketers and press teams place significant emphasis on ‘content,’ a buzzword that is seen to be a critical mode of generating cultural capital, and thus sales, for a brand.

A similar and recent example of brand-generated editorial is the print publication Porter, the in-house fashion magazine launched by Net-a-Porter in 2015. Porter models itself off the tradition of the seasonal high fashion magazine, and, though it is obviously affiliated with the Net-a-Porter group, still targets the same audience as its competitors, and is thus challenged by notions of transparency in terms of the brands they choose to feature – or not feature – in their fashion stories.

The relationship between advertising (brand) and editorial (publication) in fashion has never been straightforward, as scholar Lynda Dyson contends, ‘Editorial is […] perhaps, the most valuable form of media content because it is perceived to be unbiased and believable. Its ‘‘purity’’ (precisely because it is not advertising) derives from its aura of authority and neutrality.’⁵ But this merging of brand and publication has profound implications. The reality facing these relationships as they explore the paradigm of editorial-as-brand extension, beyond the era of print sales, is the compromise on editorial selection process. Even in posting a disclaimer at the end of their review of the Vuitton show, one could argue that BoF still faces the same issue of what is not said in the article. Thus the challenge facing fashion journalism lies in what an editor, stylist or writer chooses to feature.

The implications of commercial ties needs to go beyond a statement tacked on at the end of an article since it will inevitably permeate the editorial decision-making of what is published and written. For example, BoF’s Vuitton show review featured extensive quotes from an interview with LVMH’s chief executive, Michael Burke, who justified the show as an economic strategy for the luxury conglomerate despite the controversial locale, allegedly motivated by ‘generat[ing] dedicated global media coverage and activate regional markets.’⁶ The article appeared to defend the cultural implications of the event by choosing to feature a largely one-sided argument with a representative from LVMH, and so was not able to generate debate on the topic. In this case, as with others, the potential for self-censorship on what is written, so as not to compromise their source of funding (LVMH), is, arguably, as powerful as the choice of garments featured on the pages of Porter. Since, in the case of BoF, ‘investors have signed shareholder’s documentation guaranteeing BoF’s complete editorial independence,’ a risk might be that this apparent transparency allows the publishers to ‘get away’ with more.

The editorial content housed by these publications becomes a point of contention in negotiating reliable and balanced coverage. Though BoF, The Talks and Porter (among other similar brand-affiliated editorial ventures) function differently in terms of publications and have different investment models, they embrace new modes of funding that tread thorny terrain in maintaining a clear boundary between advertising and unbiased journalism. The final disclaimer at the end of the BoF article presents a move in a new direction in terms of editorial transparency, however it raises deeper questions about selectivity within editorial content.

Laura Gardner is Vestoj’s former Online Editor and a writer in Melbourne.

1. https://www.nowness.com/ ↩

2. https://www.lvmh.com/houses/other-activities/nowness/ ↩

3. ‘LVMH launches luxury online magazine Nowness,’ The Guardian blog, 27 February 2010, http://www.theguardian.com/media/pda/2010/feb/26/lvmh-luxury-online-magazine-nowness ↩

4. http://the-talks.com/ ↩

5. Dyson, L 2008, ‘Customer magazines: The rise of the “glossies” as brand extensions’, in T Holmes (ed), Mapping the magazine: Comparative studies in magazine journalism, Routledge, London. ↩

6. ‘Vuitton Investing, Not Surfing, in Brazil’ by Imran Amed and Lauren Sherman for The Business of Fashion, May 29, 2016 ↩

TODAY, HELMUT LANG WORKS as an artist. His minimalist and deconstructivist work is no longer presented on runways, but represented by galleries dealing in contemporary art. The narratives of his work emphasise the death of his fashion identity and point to his role as a new kind of creator. After resigning as creative director of his fashion house in 2005, Lang turned away from his former profession to focus solely on fine art. This decision came with creative freedom, unencumbered by the functional and economic restrictions of the moving body and wearability. From 2009 to 2010, Lang donated a large volume of his fashion archive to museums worldwide and – in that same year – a large fire in his New York studio destroyed most of the remaining archive. The destructive fire triggered a contrary reaction in Lang: why not just destroy his archive entirely? This idea generated the art installation ‘Make It Hard’, an exhibition presented in 2011 at The Fireplace Project in New York and recently installed at the Sperone Westwater Gallery, also in New York. The project that embeds Lang’s fashion archive into the art industry, forcing us to question the role of art to fashion, and – more pertinently for Lang – of fashion to the art world.

Whilst working in fashion, Lang spoke about his practise as being ‘against’ the commercial industry, as a part of a counter-movement that moved fashion towards a new kind of sobriety and away from 1980s glamour and excess. His aesthetic was very much born from the context of his time, and was a reflection of significant social changes in the beginning of the Nineties. Lang explained the conception of his runway shows as ‘séances de travail’ or ‘working sessions’: they were pitched as art events, performing the mood of the moment in which his designs were not just displayed as commodities for sale but rather as clothing that was actually worn by creative individuals. Besides becoming aligned with deconstructivism, Lang’s aesthetic was frequently described as minimalist. And indeed, his use of luxury materials, especially by the end of the Nineties, linked him closely to other minimalist designers like Jil Sander and Miuccia Prada, whose work shared the key features: simplicity and functionality. Yet, in Lang’s designs materiality was the starting point. His experiments with ‘outsider-materials’ created textural contrasts, mixing luxury fabrics with technologically-advanced and industrial materials. Lang’s more personal genre of minimalism and his preference to position himself as a ‘fashion outsider’ are now used to value his new output as a fine artist.

During his career in fashion, Lang kept the art world close by with various creative collaborations with stylists, photographers, architects, and contemporary artists, such as Louise Bourgeois and Jenny Holzer. In his campaigns, Lang frequently opted to juxtapose contemporary fashion photography and archival imagery. For his label, this became a means of distraction from the inherent commercialism of advertising, instead presenting his designs as artistic creations. This is exemplified in Lang’s campaign from the 1990s which used Robert Mapplethorpe’s iconic 1982 portrait of the artist Louise Bourgeois wearing a black monkey-fur jacket. In the campaign captions were used to grant authorship to Mapplethorpe though naturally the advertisement also included Lang’s logo, signifying that this very juxtaposition of images had been his curatorial act. The label’s New York flagship store functioned as the built embodiment of this minimalist aesthetic, lined with LED installations by Holzer and sculpture by Bourgeois, forming a crucial part of the architecture. Although his fashion designs were not unique objects, the space in which they were sold emulated a cultural and curatorial laboratory, actively creating ambiguity between commercial retail and gallery space. Symbolic value was core to this kind of marketing, which built on exclusivity and intelligence as a means of distinguishing itself from pure commerce and mass fashion. For designers such as Lang, this became a way to cultivate a status of high culture by borrowing cultural capital from art, thus maintaining a very direct relationship with his customers ‘in the know’.

Key to the various ways Lang presented his designs was an evident distraction from commercial elements, which led to an accumulation of symbolic capital to his label. This makes Lang part of a long line of fashion designers who were – and are – involved in sponsorship of the arts and engage with art through their marketing and retail channels. As a branding strategy, this enables a luxury brand to construct an artistic identity that contributes to an obfuscation of commercial operations. Although the stories about his New York shop have taken on mythical proportions, when it is placed into context it was not in fact a rarity as the minimalist spaces of contemporary art galleries had a major influence on store design during that period. Rem Koolhaas argued that minimalism even became ‘the “single signifier” of luxury, aimed at minimising “the shame of consumption”’.

Yet, while other designers – Miuccia Prada being one prominent example – never made it a secret that they were working as art patrons, Lang purposefully never positioned himself as a maecenas. Significantly, the tales told about and by Lang emphasise the symbiotic nature of his ‘more genuine’ collaborations for which he brought together a group of artists – who he also considered to be his closest friends. This narrative is closely linked to the cult status and nostalgia that is attached to Lang’s practise today and is no doubt tightly wound up with the fact that he is no longer a practicing fashion designer. For Lang, however, the latter became a valuable tool to introduce his new identity and to enter into the visual arts scene – a realm that, today still, is generally regarded as higher in the hierarchy of creative production.

Lang showed ‘Make it Hard’ for the first time in 2011 at The Fireplace Project in East Hampton. The installation of columnar forms is made of 6,000 shredded pieces of clothing and objects from his burned archive, covered with pigment and resin. It appears like a geological scape, with the pillars dispersed in the room, each measuring between ten and twelve feet high. The title of the piece, ‘Make it Hard’, challenges the logic of fashion: first destroyed and then transformed into sculpture. The columns evoke his signature deceptive tactility as they are covered with resin, a liquid that hardens into transparent solids, causing the surface to simultaneously appear hard and soft. However, in the realm of the art gallery, fashion is re-contextualised from being something one is intimately covered in, into being something we are spatially surrounded by. The exhibition’s reviews discussed its deconstructive nature and recognised Lang’s characteristic attention to shape and materiality. These interpretations are hardly a surprise, as the columns are indeed fashion objects reduced to their abstract essence. This time, however, fashion itself became the ‘outsider material’ making Lang’s former profession present only in the parts of his printed label surfacing among the textures.

In 2005, Helmut Lang’s career as a fashion designer was brought to a conclusion. In fact, it is clear that Lang devised his own conclusion by creating tension between preserving and deconstructing his fashion past. Through ‘Make It Hard’ he literally and metaphorically brought together the different elements that had been crucial to his work as a fashion designer, while simultaneously destroying and ending them. For now – and despite his efforts to transcend his former practice – criticism of his legacy in fashion has become a rather easy reading of what might otherwise appear as a complex and enigmatic minimalist piece. But then, one has to ask, perhaps the case of Helmut Lang illustrates the need we still have for strict boundaries between art and fashion?

Elisa De Wyngaert is an Antwerp-based fashion historian and writer, graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London.