When One Man Will Do [What He Wants]
Click-click-click-click-click goes the flashing imagery of a 19th century peepshow to the interminable whirring of an oversized zoetrope opening the exhibit. At the installation’s end, a Marc Jacobs doll, rotating like the zoetrope before but at snail speed, bids farewell to his guests as he turns and turns. The Louis Vuitton - Marc Jacobs exhibition, held from March 9th through September 16th in Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs, is a dizzying experience.
The exhibition attempts to present a hybrid show featuring two distinct identities that, despite their commonality of brand, don’t quite mix. Rather than reconciling the inherent disconnect between the French founder Louis Vuitton and the New Yorker, Marc Jacobs, who has been the brand’s artistic director since 1997, the two-story exhibition separates the worlds of each man into independent spaces. Though it provides a plethora of products to be viewed, from 30 antique trunks of Vuitton to the fantastical display of purses and clothing ensembles under the direction of Jacobs, the exhibition does very little to explain how the brand developed from the craftmanship of luxury luggage to the rock ‘n’ roll infused glamour icon it is today.
The result is a disjointed imbalance. There is little among the beige offerings of the Vuitton section that can compete with the kaleidoscope chaos of the floor above. Climbing the stairs, we enter Marc’s world with a bang, confronted with an overwhelming wall of backlit graphics and video monitors, flashing erratically to the blaring of Mariah Carey asking “why you so obsessed with me?” It is an alarming bombardment of the senses and hardly a transition. While it takes up considerable space, the larger-than-life seizure-inducing mood board is not grounded in anything beyond Jacobs’ fancies.
The rest of Jacobs’ world works like a walkthrough advertisement of the body and fantasy of the Louis Vuitton brand today, under the distinct direction of Jacobs. The incoherent pairing of the multitude of trunks with the bombastically executed publicity spectacle forces one to wonder if it might have made more sense to have just focused the exhibition on one man, who ends up stealing the show anyway.
Louis Vuitton - Marc Jacobs Exhibition at Musée des Arts Décoratifs
