E-Paper
Sign In
Art Dubai 2025: How to dress like a masterpiece
Time to channel your inner ‘artellectual’ - here's how to do a cooler version of you
- PUBLISHED: Fri 18 Apr 2025, 5:11 PM UPDATED: Mon 2 Jun 2025, 11:45 AM
To paraphrase Sex And The City’s Carrie Bradshaw: “I like my art where I can see it, hanging in my closet.” Admittedly, Bradshaw was referring to money rather than mixed media, but with global financial markets in free fall, art — which has the lowest correlation to global markets of all major asset classes — is the Trump era equivalent of cold, hard cash.
Happily, for those of us who prefer to hang covetable design in our wardrobes rather than on our walls, the spring/summer collections offer plenty of opportunities to combine fine art with fashion, for a look that style insiders are calling ‘artellectual’.
Recommended For You
Most visibly, Louis Vuitton has reignited its Y2K hook-up with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, which first debuted in 2003 when Marc Jacobs was at the helm of the Parisian house. “A monumental marriage of art and commerce” is how Jacobs described the partnership that thrived until 2015. This year, the LV x Murakami oeuvre has been reissued, with actor Zendaya fronting the campaign. Candy-coloured monogram and anime cherry blossom motifs bring a sprinkling of joy to everything from a Dh960 hair scrunchie to a Dh42,500 camera box bag (there’s even a Dh1,800 pencil case and a Dh2,060 ceramic coffee cup for the ultimate desk flex). Customers can only buy one of each design, to ringfence what Vuitton calls ‘exceptional rarity’.
If, like me, you lusted after the OG LV x TM in the early aughts, and, two decades on, feel that your style has evolved to a more cerebral plane, Vuitton still has you covered. What could be more perfect to wear at The Art Bar during the 18th edition of Art Dubai this weekend than pieces from the house’s collaboration with French painter Laurent Grasso? Most wanted is the Cotteville 35 Grasso bag (Dh106,000), the showpiece of the collaboration between Vuitton’s artistic director of women’s collections, Nicolas Ghesquière, with the landscape artist. Grasso’s paintings also form the backdrop to Vuitton’s spring/summer campaign starring K-pop and White Lotus Season 3 star Lisa, and actor Saoirse Ronan. Should you prefer to save that kind of investment for oil on canvas rather than monogrammed canvas, you can still dabble in wearable artwork with a Louis Vuitton x Laurent Grasso print tee (Dh3,900), ideal for dinner at The Arts Club.
Vuitton is not the only fashion house to merge ready-to-wear with real-life art this season. For his penultimate collection as creative director for the Spanish fashion house Loewe, Joanathan Anderson — this week confirmed as the new artistic director of Dior menswear — created feathered tops featuring artwork by painters Vincent Van Gogh and Édouard Manet. The Dutch master’s Sunflowers series and Irises emerge from the 19th century to lend Loewe spring/summer 2025 serious artistic heft. Fitting, then, that the collection was showcased around a 2017 sculpture of a bird by Tracey Emin.
Arguably, the luxury fashion brand with the deepest connection to the art world has long been Prada, with its founder Miuccia Prada and her husband, Patrizio Bertelli, establishing contemporary art space Fondazione Prada back in 1993. Last week, it was announced that Prada Group is acquiring another Italian icon, Versace, for €1.25 billion (Dh5.2 billion). While the two labels may seem diametrically opposed aesthetically— one being the very embodiment of artellectual, the other more concerned with baroque extravagance — this season, Versace’s nerdy geometric yellow, brown and lavender zigzag knits are giving less Versace vixen and more, well, Miu Miu (Prada’s younger sister line) . Coincidence?
Meanwhile, Miu Miu — an official partner of Art Basel Paris —
recruited Polish artist Goshka Macuga to collaborate on its spring/summer 2025 show, creating a set based on a newspaper printing press as commentary on the representation of truth.
Finally, for a subtle nod to gallerista style, I’ve gone full circle and returned to Louis Vuitton, whose spring/summer 2025 collection includes the LV Fan (Dh15,100), a bag that doubles as that most essential of art-browsing props for wafting around galleries looking inscrutable; it’s the essential artellectual accessory. With fine art and fashion forming this season’s most enticing investments, here’s hoping that frocks and shoes prove less volatile than stocks and shares.
