Sorry London, Moscow and Paris.
Women’s Wear Daily reported that Chanel is cutting short at midpoint its planned six-city “Mobile Art” tour of the futuristic pod designed by Zaha Hadid to display Chanel-commissioned art that was “inspired by Chanel’s classic…quilted-style chain handbag” (above).
Even Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld apparently regarded the “inspired” art as uninspired. According to WWD, he commented that he had wanted to scrap the most recent stop of the tour, New York, unless New York artists were substituted (they weren’t) for the international group of artists who had inaugurated the tour.
Lagerfeld told WWD:
I always thought the building was a sculpture. I prefer it empty.
Having already induced the Metropolitan Museum to compromise its curatorial integrity with a 2005 Chanel exhibition that, as I said in my NY Times Op-Ed piece, “was as much as an advertisement for Mr. Lagerfeld as a paean to Coco,” Karl this past October and November made an even more unseemly commercial incursion into public land in Central Park for a pretentious, high-priced commercial promotion of Chanel handbags, called by NY Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff, “a dubious undertaking [that] might have seemed indulgent a year ago,” but today “looks delusional.”
In both cases, the hosting venues should have known better.
Here’s what a Chanel spokesperson told WWD:
Considering the current economic crisis, we decided it was best to
stop the project. We will be concentrating
on strategic growth investments.
Like a new line of quilted and chained handbags, perhaps?