Is the stand-alone luxury boutique a dying breed?
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Iconic Swimwear Brand Shuts US Stores
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Over the last decade, collaborations between luxury brands and contemporary artists have gone beyond mere artistic partnerships towards a new kind of luxury branding.
PARIS – Art and fashion have always developed side by side, for fashion, like art, often gives visual expression to the cultural zeitgeist. During the 1920s, Salvador Dalí created dresses for Coco Chanel and Elsa Schiapparelli. In the 1930s, Ferragamo’s shoes commissioned designs for advertisements from Futurist painter Lucio Venna, while Gianni Versace commissioned works from artists such as Alighiero Boetti and Roy Lichtenstein for the launch of his collections. Yves Saint Laurent’s vast art collection, recently auctioned at Christie’s in Paris, testified to his great love of art and revealed the influence of a variety of artists on his own designs.
In the 1980s, relationships between luxury brands and artists were advanced when Alain Dominique Perrin created the Fondation Cartier. In the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, a book marking the foundation’s 20th anniversary, Perrin says he makes “a connection between all the different sorts of arts, and luxury goods are a kind of art. Luxury goods are handicrafts of art, applied art.”
The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemparain building in Paris
Is the stand-alone luxury boutique a dying breed?
About a month after LS reported that legendary Parisian boutique, Maria Luisa, was closing to focus on online and department store sales, luxury lingerie and swimwear brand Eres has also announced that from August they will be closing their three US stores in Manhattan, Los Angeles and Palm Beach.
The brand, known for its sculptural swimwear, feels a more effective business model will be shop-in-shops and franchises — a model similar to that which they follow in Europe. Speaking to WWD, Oliver Mauny, president of the company, said they were in discussion with several US retailers including Neiman Marcus: “We currently have opportunities for several possible franchises and in-store shops in Los Angeles, Palm Beach and Washington, DC,” he said. “We expect to have other opportunities, especially after the Miami swimwear show this month. “The commercial model best suited to our activity is the network of 60 retailers in the US, which includes Saks Fifth Avenue and Barneys New York,” Mauny said. “This is why we are adapting our model and closing three boutiques in the US that had expensive leases. We’ll be focusing on the network of our 60 established retailers going forward.”
With seasoned luxury retailer Maria Luisa Poumaillou, amongst others, also feeling drawn away from the boutique model, it is clear that, as Poumaillou puts it, “The evolution of the retail sector over the past 20 years has been colossal.” Explaining her decision to shut up shop, she described online and large department store channels as being “100 times” more powerful than her much loved boutique, in terms of sales and visibility.
As luxury brands struggle to reconcile boutique sales with the enormous overhead costs, it looks like good news for department stores and, more than ever, underlines the need for luxury brands to get selling online.
Sources
WWD
