ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at the curatorial imperative in the field of luxury fashion. More precisely, I explore what I dub “banal luxury”, which includes the milieus around the brands Balenciaga and Vetements and the designer Demna Gvasalia. I employ the concept of “the Warhol economy” to talk about the highbrow interweaving of art, fashion, avant-garde aesthetics, and the underground in these milieus, which is evocative of the interdisciplinary crisscrossing of Andy Warhol around his studio Factory. Banal luxury curates atmospheres of coolness in digital platforms that qualify a meme-savvy, subversive, forward-looking, extrovert, and socially aware outlook. In the chapter, I discuss Gvasalia as a figure actualizing these elements in his self-presentations, the function of the selfie as a counterintuitive lowbrow portraiture in Vetements’ Instagram account and the launch of provocative luxury items aiming to create internet buzz, especially around youth cultures. Platform connectivity and participation here are the raw materials that actors of banal luxury curate for inscribing atmospheres of streetwise coolness in luxury undertakings.
