Miami Art Week — which brings together a number of art fairs, including Art Basel Miami Beach — is back on fashion form.
With activations beginning as early as Monday, the week will feature events and exhibitions from brands including Pucci, Cartier, Rabanne, L’artist, Hublot, Bvlgari, Maison Margiela, Gucci, Golden Goose, Balmain, Fendi and Bottega Veneta, among others. It’s a noticeable ramping up after last year, when the intersection of art and luxury fashion was a lesser focus.
Luxury brands are more closely aligning with fine art, hoping to position goods as artworks versus utilities, identifying art collectors as a rarified group with discretionary income. The art fairs also benefit, as they become more commercial and more consumer friendly. “Both industries seek to leverage each other’s cultural cachet,” Artnet News’s editor-in-chief Naomi Rea recently told Vogue Business.
Meanwhile, South Florida has experienced an influx of wealth, both fiat (nearby West Palm Beach is now known as ‘Wall Street South’) and crypto (Miami’s government successfully attracted a crowd of crypto investors and entrepreneurs). A number of brands, including Ralph Lauren, Gucci and Balenciaga, began accepting cryptocurrency payments in their Miami stores. It’s made Miami Art Week a fertile climate for brand-tech experimentation, as well as larger-than-life ‘storytelling’ opportunities that take advantage of Miami’s characteristically diverse, colourful culture.
“For us, it’s the amplification and connection between art and our maisons and what we do — we treat our products as art, and Art Basel literally is LVMH, just focused on a different medium. It aligns with everything that we are and that we represent,” says Corey Smith, LVMH head of diversity and inclusion, who oversees the luxury group’s annual Culture House during the week. “There is an absolute connection between luxury, art, tech, media and culture, and these are the things that LVMH celebrates daily with our clients in our maisons. [This fair] brings a bunch of people together from all walks of life, but if you are at Art Basel, you certainly have art in common.”
Miami’s enduring appeal
South Florida has become a year-round hotspot in the years since the pandemic, and brands are hoping to appeal to those who have relocated there. In 2022, Miami was one of the fastest-growing regions for luxury in the US, Morgan Stanley reported. The diversity of the audience is uniquely valuable, Smith says. “We could do this in any other city or time of year… but the power of Miami specifically — the power of Art Basel — is that it attracts people from all over the world. For LVMH, it is one of the major hubs to our Latin American properties.”
