Luxury art and collectables
For three days in October the world’s largest luxury group let strangers into its workshops. Here is what changed, who got in, and why it matters. Every so often luxury does something delightfully counterintuitive: it gives away what it normally guards. From October 16 to 18, LVMH, the group behind Louis Vuitton, Dior, Moët & … Read more
In a world that can generate anything in seconds, the rarest luxury is something that cannot be rushed. In our piece on the Rimowa x Faber-Castell case we said luxury loves the analog. Here is the evidence. By “analog” we mean objects that work through hands, materials and mechanisms rather than screens: turntables, pens, film … Read more
The oldest watch manufacture in continuous operation just spent 18 months mentoring a furniture maker, a ceramicist, and a jeweler. None of them make watches. That’s the point. Luxury patronage usually looks predictable: a fashion house sponsors an art prize, a watchmaker underwrites a museum wing, everyone gets a plaque. Vacheron Constantin and The Metropolitan … Read more
In an era of AI-smoothed everything, a photographer who refuses to retouch just landed the most talked-about art residency of the season. Every wrinkle. Every pore. Every laugh line Dolly Parton has earned. That’s the entire premise of THE PLAYLIST, a new exhibition from British photographer Andy Gotts MBE — once called “the Ansel Adams … Read more
A common trend is emerging in home renovations. Shelves with no visible support, lighting that seems to float mid-air, screens that divide a room seemingly without touching the ceiling—suspended architecture is everywhere once you know what you’re looking for. But somewhere behind the plaster or above the ceiling line is an invisible fixing doing the … Read more
Decoding Chanel’s world-first Haute Horlogerie chessboard — and why the watch industry is suddenly obsessed with games. Somewhere in a Swiss workshop, a team of artisans spent thousands of hours doing something that, on paper, sounds almost absurdly simple: building a chess set. Except this isn’t the chess set gathering dust in your parents’ living … Read more