Commuters walking to work this (uncomfortably warm) Halloween morning on New York’s Fifth Avenue may have noticed a costume of mind-boggling proportions: An old building dressed like Louis Vuitton luxury luggage trunks.
Louis Vuitton’s flagship at 1 East 57th Street is being replaced with a building that will nearly double its footprint along Billionaire’s Row. The fashion brand took an interesting approach to masking the construction site when it installed this week what appears to be a faux facade made of oversized Louis Vuitton trunks, its signature item.
The actual accessory can go for anywhere between $35,000 and $60,000. A spokesperson for Louis Vuitton told AN that the installation was designed by the company’s in-house team. The provocation has already caused a social media storm—Redditors are debating whether or not it’s a duck or a decorated shed.
This installation however isn’t without precedent. Last September, Louis Vuitton rolled out renderings of a giant trunk facade for a building on Paris’s Champs-Élysées. Pietro Beccari, Louis Vuitton chief executive, was the mastermind behind that attraction. The luxury brand pulled off a similar scheme in 2005.
But Louis Vuitton’s antics haven’t been without controversy. When the trunk facade went up in Paris last year, city councillors from the Green party wrote socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo a letter expressing their discontents. The Greens, in their letter, questioned the stunt’s legality.
Under French law, property owners can apply advertisements to their buildings in order to pay for facade renovations, but the advertisements cannot cover more than 50 percent of the facade area. The Greens noted that the Louis Vuitton trunk covered “more than 50 percent of the space, including the roof too.” The city of Paris ultimately sided with Louis Vuitton, however, because the city determined that the installation was not in fact an advertisement.
Back in New York, the parent company driving the replacement is LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton. That was the same group who backed Tiffany & Company’s flagship redesign by OMA, across 57th Street at 720 Fifth Avenue.
A timeline for the new building at 1 East 57th Street hasn’t been publicly announced.
