Ambitious concepts and awe-inspiring production feats, such as the global LV x Yayoi Kusama campaign, continue to be the ultimate tool for status signalling when it comes to luxury brands.

Giant sculptures, lifelike animatronics and façade dominating ‘painted dots’ characterised the international launch of the LV X Yayoi Kusama collaboration. Physically and visually engulfing many of the worlds most iconic and prestigious retailers, it was a status signalling campaign only within the reach of luxury giants like Louis Vuitton. From Japan to Paris, this physical roll-out signals the brands global domination as well as site specific influence on some of the worlds most prestigious retail centres, such as Harrods, Selfridges and Galleries-Lafayettes. 

Burberry collaborated with Cuban-American artist Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada to create a 4,500 sqm land art version of their iconic nova check. As visually arresting, Burberry’s temporary installations as part of their landscape series claim a more eco-conscious stance, as the projects can be ‘removed without trace’ as well as tying into a notion of brand connection to the earth and nature.

Their most recent iteration involved crop planting to make the same check print viewed from above – similiar to Bottega Veneta’s 2022 takoever of the great wall of china, these super-scale branded sites enter interesting territory of visual (if temporary) ‘ownership’ of natural of heritage sites. Each example is arguably problematic in their own ways – Kusama, now 93 and voluntarily living in a mental health facility, and the local workers employed to carry out Burberry’s South African installation of land art.

Whatever the ideology, physical ownership of sites, increasingly ambitious retail façade takeovers and domination of natural sites are on the up in the jostle for supremacy in luxury fashion.