Luxury is Attention: On the Benjaminian
Dialectics of the Prada Epicenter, New York
Snezhana Kuzmina
Research Masters Thesis: Media Studies
University of Amsterdam, 2016
Supervisor:
dr. M.A.M.B. Marie Lous Baronian
Second Reader: Dr. A.M. Abe Geil
September 1
st2016
Introduction
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Chapter 1 “Artwork Essay”
11
Chapter 2 “Auratic Building”
17
Chapter 3 “Cinematic
Building”
24
Chapter 4 “New Attractions”
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Conclusion
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Bibliography
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All department stores will become museums, and all museums will become
department stores.
(Andy Warhol, quoted by Ryan, 2007: 14).
At the time of Warhol’s peak influence, there was still, arguably, a noted distinction between forms of elite culture (usually found in museums) and mass consumerism. The artist’s statement which addresses the erosion of this distinction, and the blurring of the commercial and the creative, seems particularly prophetic today.
Following the dissemination of post-modernity across all strata of society, many of the traditions that had bound and segmented culture have been attacked and displaced by the wheels of a globalised economy, that pushes everything towards constant change and flux. Zygmunt Bauman has famously termed this form of modernity as “liquid”. In his second book on the subject, Culture
in a Liquid Modern World (2011), he writes:
I use the term ‘liquid modernity’ here for the currently existing shape of the modern condition, described by other authors as ‘postmodernity’, ‘late modernity’, ‘second’ or ‘hyper’ modernity. What makes modernity ‘liquid’, and thus justifies the choice of name, is its self- propelling, selfintensifying, compulsive and obsessive ‘modernization’, as a result of which, like liquid, none of the consecutive forms of social life is able to maintain its shape for long. (Bauman, 11)
The liquid modern world he describes is almost entirely propelled through forms of consumption, which itself is encouraged by the ubiquitous (and suitably vague) occupation of our times: design. In Design & Crime (And Other Diatribes) (2002), Hal Foster situates the importance of architecture and design within the “the spread of a post-Fordist economy of tweaked commodities and niched markets”, within which ‘display’ enables us to experience an “almost seamless circuit of production and consumption” (Foster, xiv). Perhaps nothing embodies these cycles of consumption and modernisation more than the fashion system.
Fashion, as the system we are familiar with now, defined by the tides of seasons and trends, arose almost contemporaneously with the onset of modernity and, as noted by Elizabeth Wilson in
Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (2003), it is essential to an understanding of it (Wilson,
is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent” and illustrates this through the example of dress, urging painters to depict the clothing of the present(Baudelaire, 17). Already by the mid-19th Century, Baudelaire understood the intrinsic link of clothing and fashion to the impermanent character of modernity. Furthermore, fashion becomes almost impossible to discuss without a recourse to the escalation of urban, metropolitan life, which emulsified different classes of people within a single environment. Several decades after Baudelaire, sociologist Georg Simmel
published the first truly theoretical and academic writings on fashion in 1904, in the journal
International Quarterly. Simmel’s biggest contribution, inspired by the work of Veblen on
“conspicuous consumption”, was on tracing the links between fashion and class distinctions, in his famous model of the “trickle-down” effect: that the haute-couture trends of the upper classes are then emulated down the social ladder. While Simmel’s model is, undoubtedly an oversimplification, it is nevertheless useful for understanding the ideological ramifications and barriers posed before fashion by intellectual institutions (Wilson, 138).
For decades, apart from certain select circles, fashion had been a rather maligned topic among "serious" discussions, partly on account of its connection to the commercial sphere, but also due to its gendered nature1. Today, while some traditional sectors like the print industry and museums are floundering, fashion has grown in power, both economic and cultural. Within academia, the
concept of fashion has become a multifaceted and fascinating field, with journals such as Fashion
Theory publishing a wide-range of discussions on fashion and philosophy, sociology, and politics,
amongst many other examples. When we talk about fashion today, we talk about a globalised economy, rapid and constant change and, undeniably, power. This is attributable, to an extent, to it being one of the forms most emblematic of modernity, and, in turn, post-modernity. In addition, fashion’s acceptance within elite institutions over the last two decades has also partially attributed to its substantiation. The importance of this development has been deemed to such an extent that the topic of fashion exhibition and museology has become a major discourse within both the fields of fashion theory and museum studies.
Fashion Museology and Flagship stores
Despite the importance of fashion to modernity, fashion had, until recently, been largely omitted from the elite cultural and intellectual institutions - as a practice, an object or even subject of discussion. At best, it had been considered a craft, and at worst, as frivolous “feminized” entertainment. Fashion’s inclusion in museums (which is a big point of discussion among both fashion and museology studies currently) had been almost exclusively only as a historical artefact.
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Even rarer still would a fashion object be presented as an artwork. However, in part due to the onset of post-modernism, things began to rapidly change towards the end of the 1980’s in to the 1990’s.
As cultural hierarchies and ideological barriers between artforms began to break down towards the end of the ‘80s, the spaces of fashion began to change. Museums began to hold fashion
exhibitions as a way to increase footfall - often these exhibits would become “blockbusters”,
satisfying a demand for ticket sales. In tandem with this new inclusion in to the consecrated spaces of the intellectual elite, high-end avant-garde fashion also began to alter its perception within its own retail spaces, by adopting the minimalist aesthetics of gallery space in to boutique designs (boutiques that, symbolically, began to replace galleries in major cultural capitals like New York) - particularly the newly established “flagship” stores - a chain’s largest or most prominent location. As discussed in more detail in Chapter Two, the ideological desires here are quite transparent. Not merely complimenting the minimalist designs of the actual merchandise that these fashion brands (and the general minimalist aesthetic that became de rigueur in the 1990s), the minimalism of the stores, by evoking the spatiality of the “White Cube” gallery design, sought to capitalise on the symbolic power that was now established with this style of architecture. In its starkness, the goal of the architecture was to focus all attention on the artwork, turning it in to an object of contemplation, thus imbuing it with “aura” - a perception of uniqueness and authenticity - and therefore increasing its cult value. For this reason, the acquisition of “aura”, which had largely been reserved for traditional artworks (arguably the most highly regarded cultural objects) had become a concern for some of the more high-end and exclusive circles of fashion.2
The fusion of fashion and museums was, nevertheless, viewed with suspicion. Museums were seen as “sell-outs”, while the flagship stores were deemed to be be embracing avant-garde architecture only for the sake of capitalism, turning architecture and fashion into “a mediatised, promotional selling machine drive[n] by celebrity designers and archistars” (Crewe, 2010, 2094). And yet, as is evidenced in the design of their first “Epicenter” in New York, the luxury goods brand Prada appear to reorient this completely, or to at least deflect the accusations of corporatisation and negative appropriation that has been assigned to similar retail spaces. In the documentary
Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect (2008), architect Clemens Weisshaar, who worked on the
project, stresses that the Prada Epicenter is not just any flagship store, or, according to them, a flagship store at all…
2 “Uniqueness" and “authenticity is not of high importance within fast-fashion, for example, such as high-street brands
like TopShop and Zara, who frequently translate trends from fashion week catwalks into affordable copies within a few weeks. This has only increased the demand for an “auratic” experience from the elite fashion brands like Prada.
Prada
The Prada Epicenter, Soho3, was the first in the collaboration between Prada and Dutch architect
Rem Koolhaas, with a second Epicenter built in Los Angeles in 2004 (a third Epicenter in Tokyo was designed by Herzog & de Meuron). Koolhaas’s agency OMA, or Office for Metropolitan Architecture, was approached by Prada not to simply design a single building, but to re-strategise the brand’s identity. Prada first visited OMA offices in Rotterdam in 1999, announcing that the company image was in need of a radical overhaul. During the late 1990s, it metamorphosised from a small family company to an “international fashion empire”, buying out several other major labels, and opening twenty-six new stores worldwide. This, together with the popularity of counterfeit Prada products, resulted in an overexposure of the brand, and a saturation of their image. This overproduction and ubiquity of the brand, as the Projects for Prada book argues, resulted in a “decrease in aura”, or an association with “empty exclusivity and cheap accessibility” (de la Peña, 113).
One of the prominent ways in which Prada contributes to its image of sophistication and
intellectualism is through an association with the arts, which continues to this day. Crucial to this endeavour is the Prada Fondazione, which operates independently from the brand’s manufacturing and retail sector. Active for over two decades, the Fondazione funds, hosts and sanctions art and culture, even projects that are critical of the brand, such as Prada Marfa (2005)4. The Fondazione
highlights two important points; Prada’s interest in collaboration with other cultural sectors and figures; and their willingness to embrace critical or unfavourable opinions.
While these activities had been going on extraneously to the brand since the early 1990s, the fashion house turned to architecture, and to OMA to both amp up and alter the conversation around Prada, and retail in general. As the Projects for Prada book states in its opening, “the project was underscored by the desire to study and develop the concept and the function of the shopping and communications spaces in an experimental way” (Projects for Prada). Therefore, their stated intention was not to simply create another space for the selling of goods - they had too many of these already, five in New York alone. Rather, the space itself was designed to reflect the evolving image of the brand, by existing as a physical manifestation of theoretical thought. As such, no longer a flagship store, the spaces were termed “Epicenter”. Tim Lücker from OMA states; “It had to become an art laboratory. That was the whole idea. Hence the name Epicenter. It
3
also referred to as “Prada Epicenter New York”, and “Prada Epicenter Broadway”.
4 Prada Marfa by Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, was a reconstruction of a classic Prada boutique in a Texas
emanates something, but at the same time it’s some kind of receptor” (Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of
Architect, 2008)
Built on the site of the former Guggenheim Soho Museum, and at 24,000-square-foot, occupying a full city block, Prada appear to take this museological connection as the launchpad for a
reconceptualisation of what a retail space can be5. Deeming most spaces, including museums,
libraries, airports, hospitals, and schools to have succumbed to “commercial entrapment” as a form of “retail for survival”, the Prada/OMA project proposes a reversal of the equation, where
“customers were no longer identified as consumers, but recognised as researchers, students, patients, museum goers?”, they question, “What if the shopping experience were not one of impoverishment, but of enrichment?” (Projects for Prada). As such, the space is no longer
designated as a store, but as a heterogenous playing ground. The result is a myriad of connecting and yet conflicting elements. Fusing fashion, architecture, art and technology, it is a convergence of design and theoretical thought, and has become a “defining moment” in the history of fashion and architecture, that has had an impact on the future of retail design, inviting a burgeon of imitations, including concept stores for Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Armani (Curtis, 8; de la Peña, 110). Crucially, Prada set out to change the conversation regarding fashion, and the concept of “luxury” overall, in tune with the cultural changes of the time. And, appropriately, it embarked on this journey by manipulating the most physical of media; architecture.
Fashion, Architecture and the Body
As fashion and architecture began to establish their relationship only in the 1990s, the history of their convergence within academic discourse is even more recent. Arguably it is only within the last decade or so that any significant discussions have emerged concerning these two disciplines together, and many commentators still feel the need to establish their connections. From an
abstract and conceptual perspective, the differences between fashion and architecture seem stark, almost opposites. Louise Crewe, in “Wear:where? The convergent geographies of architecture and fashion”, goes in to detail on their diametric dissimilitude:
Fashion is suggestive of transience, pliability, ephemerality, and superficiality (Hollander, 1975). It uses soft, sometimes fragile, materials. It is characterised by rapid temporality, neophilia, and operates on the smallest, closest in scales of the body. Architecture, in contrast, calls forth notions of longevity, permanence, and solidity. Using rigid materials, architecture is considered monumental, durable, substantive… (Crewe, 2093)
5 Prada’s Tokyo Epicenter also holds an interesting connections to museums, as its architects, Herzog and de Meuron,
performed a similar act of spatial re-appropriation contemporaneously to the first Prada collaboration with OMA, transforming London’s Bankside Power Station to the famous Tate Modern Gallery in 2000.
Crewe’s article, which aims to reconcile the difference she outlines above, builds on the seminal work performed by Bradley Quinn in his book The Fashion of Architecture (2003). Published already after the construction of the Prada Soho Epicenter (to which Quinn devotes a significant discussion), the book was the first to comprehensively address the complex dynamic between the two design disciplines, and he convincingly grounds this in their equal relationship to the human body. Quinn’s paragraph on this matter is worth reading in full:
The connections between the two disciplines are significant: both rely heavily upon human proportions, mathematics and geometry to create the protective layers in which we cocoon ourselves. Fashion and architecture revolve around the scale of the human form to signify their dimensions, requiring an
understanding of mass as well as space. They both operate within the same spatial frameworks to manage energy and material, and map the boundaries of the body by creating climatic environmental systems around it. Garments are wrapped around the body in successive layers of underwear, outer clothing and overcoats that define the outer core of the body, whilst tiers of sleeping bags, tents and shelters symbolically expand into houses and skyscrapers. Within this system the garments can be seen as more than mere clothing – they form part of a structure that negotiates the relationship between private spaces and public arenas, both defining our identity and place in society. (Quinn, 6)
An intriguing part of this statement is the somewhat defensive tone in regards to fashion. By connecting fashion with architecture, Quinn attempts to rehabilitate its image and stress its importance in understanding how we navigate the world. In The Spaces and Places of Fashion (2009), editor John Potvin suggests a similar transaction. Quoting esteemed spatial theoretician Henri Lefebvre, Potvin argues that spaces are mediums whose properties are contingent on their contents and it is through a recourse to embodiment that space “might help locate fashion on the map of political and cultural identity”, leading to the belief that fashion’s current growth in power is at least in part attributed to the changes in fashion spaces, for space, and architecture, are fashion’s most natural allies on account of their mutual links to the body (Potvin, 5).
Amazingly, the notion of fashion as an embodied practice was also not fully established until the publishing of Joanne Entwistle’s groundbreaking book The Fashioned Body in 2000, in which Entwistle attempts to move away from the history-as-dress paradigm that had dominated fashion studies and positioned clothes mostly as mere inert and static objects. Instead, Entwistle’s book traces the theoretical, political and anthropological dimensions of fashion and clothing as
something that was closely and intimately tied to the body.
These works, and many others not mentioned here, were largely published contemporaneously, or several years after the launch of the Prada store, which makes Prada’s decision to adopt
architecture as its chosen medium for reinvention, so as to tackle their over-exposure problem, all the more ahead of its time. However, as is delved in to in Chapter Two, the Prada store does not
simply rely on references to museum space as a way of achieving this, but embarks upon something far more intellectual.
Benjamin
The store symbolises a significant shift not only in retail architecture, but across a multitude of fields. At the time of its launch, it garnered significant attention not only from top architecture publications, such as Interior Design, Architectural Digest and Architectural Record, but also mass press like The Washington Post, The New York Times, Newsweek and The Observer.
Furthermore, the store has also already been the topic of several scholarly journal publications. Dutch architecture critic Dick van den Huevel offered a rather scathing critique of the project after its launch, voicing skepticism over Prada/OMA’s apparent philanthropic ambitions, instead arguing that the store produces its own metropolitan elite through a negotiation of hybridised culture (“Reconstructing Prada/OMA”, 2002, 114). Carolyn de la Peña takes a similarly critical stance in her analysis of Prada technologies in “Read-to-wear Globalism: Mediating Materials and Prada’s GPS” (2003). de la Peña reviews the prominent use of innovative materials (e.e. plastic seating) and technologies (e.g. screens) as GPS - global positioning devices - that instil in the Prada visitor a sense of global citizenship in exchange for the branding of their own bodies. Noted media scholar Lev Manovich, however, takes a more optimistic approach, and presents Prada’s prolific use of technology as an example of the expansion of “augmented space”, or space that is filled with “dynamic and rich multimedia information”, solidifying the project’s pioneering character (“The poetics of augmented space”, 2006). Analysis of the collaboration between Prada and Koolhaas also form significant portions of the articles “Prada and the Art of Patronage” (2007), by Nicky Ryan, and Louise Crewe’s aforementioned “Wear : where? The Convergent Geographies of Architecture and Fashion”. While Ryan argues that Prada’ collaborations with other creative enterprises and people, including Koolhaas, are ultimately rooted in appropriating their cultural cachè, Crewe presents an ambivalent picture around Koolhaas’ ideological reasoning behind getting involved with a retail giant like Prada, despite his previous critiques of such institutions. What all these essays point to is a vacillating and ideologically grey object, whose paradoxical identity may be by design.
It is my argument that the store exists beyond being “the first of its type”, though its significance can be felt in the buildings that followed it. Rather than the store providing an example of luxury retail architecture in general, or as an illustration of a wider theory, the analysis forthwith sees the store as a unique object, one that is the theory. As in the words of the store’s creators, the space is designed to exist as a laboratory for experimental thought on retail, art and public space. It seems to encapsulate its own (unknown) hypothesis, and functions as rhizome which emanates a myriad
of discussions on, just to name a few; fashion, architecture, museology, technology, post-modernity, art, class and capitalism.
However, a particular gap among the scholarly literature was a deep engagement with the concept of “aura”, despite multiple references to the topic by the designers themselves. Projects for Prada voices the brand’s concerns following their expansion of stores, in the following statement:
The danger of a large number of stores is repetition: each additional store reduces aura and contributes to a sense of familiarity. The danger of larger scale is the Flagship syndrome: a megalomaniac accumulation of the obvious that eliminates the last elements of surprise and mystery that cling to the brand, imprisoning it in a definitive identity. (Projects for Prada)
Despite this, they offer the argument that aura can be preserved through the continuation of building more spaces, but creating something unexpected that, significantly, ruminates on this specific problem. Poignantly, Fücker states on the collaboration with Prada for the first Epicenter: “It was all about the aura”(Rem Koolhaas: A Kind of Architect). Aura, these sources suggest, was the core stimulus for the store’s unique design, and yet, it was barely addressed by any of the scholars analysing this object. Nicky Ryan makes brief mention of it, when she argues that “The Prada brand image or “aura” was predicated on a consumer culture that prized “artistic” sensibility and the overarching concept that endowed the Epicenter project with status and legitimacy was art” (Ryan, 16). Ryan, thereby, only attributes aura the same limited meaning as “brand image”, and she fails to extend the relationship between art, aura and fashion presented in this comment any further. Carlyn de la Peña makes mention of an “aura room” in the store (which is the subject of discussion in Chapter Two). de la Peña’s analysis is brief, though it does seem to equate aura both with a minimalist white aesthetic, and the concept of history. Her short interpretation thus became the initial inspiration for this thesis, beginning as a close discussion between aura and white cube museological practices.
However, in turning to the authoritative source material on “aura” by Walter Benjamin, and engaging deeply with his formative essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility” (1936), I discovered that I was able to make parallels between the Prada store and Benjamin’s essay beyond a limited discussion of aura and minimalist space, but as a way of
engaging with all the variant questions that the store raises. It even appeared at times that
elements of the space were almost deliberate references to this classic piece of media theory, as a physical, critical engagement with (and even a reinterpretation and deconstruction of) Benjamin’s concept of “aura” and its adjacent arguments. This is not outside of the realm of possibility as both of the chief people behind the creation of this store, Muccia Prada and Rem Koolhaas, are notable for their intellectual and conceptual approaches to design. Koolhaas had, up to that point, been known more for his conceptual philosophical writings on architecture and urban design, being
influenced by critical theorists such as Bruno Latour and Jeremy Bantham, whilst Muccia Prada carries the reputation of being a highly educated individual (having obtained a Phd in Political Science) who’s design process is centred on intelligent concepts, rather than a focus on traditional ideals of beauty (Fury, online article).6
In addition, Benjamin, despite not writing about fashion directly, has proven to be a very useful figure within the field of fashion theory, as he is a key figure in modernity discourses. His work in
The Arcades Project, notions of the flaneur, dandy, history and the dialectical image have inspired
a wide range of discourse, including Anne Friedberg’s Window Shopping (1993), Eun Jung Kang’s “The Dialectical Image, the Redemption of Fashion” (2014), and Heidi Brevik - Zender’s “Let them wear manolas: fashion, Walter Benjamin, and Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette” (2011).
Specifically on the topic of aura and fashion, marketing scholars Delphine Dion and Eric Arnould argue that luxury brands are endowed with “aura” through the charisma of the creative director (Dion and Arnould, 503). While such a position can be applied in the case of Prada (Muccia Prada undoubtedly has suitable amounts of charisma and artistic vision), I would argue that this relies on somewhat of a misreading of Benjamin, who asserts that the “magic of personality” (such as of a movie star) is a form of commodification and not true aura (Benjamin, 113).
Thesis Overview
As this thesis places significant emphasis on Benjamin’s ‘artwork essay’ as its theoretical framework, Chapter One is devoted to an in-depth overview of both the concept of “aura” that it introduces, but also the wider arguments presented in the text, as they bear as much significance to the analysis of the store that follows in the rest of the thesis. This chapter presents my own interpretation of Benjamin’s most famous work, as well as a brief review of a selection of other literature on the subject, including texts by Miriam Bratu Hansen, and Susan Buck-Morss.
Chapter Two commences the analysis of the Prada Epicenter itself by situating it in relation to the influence of museums on the fashion industry and its spaces. This chapter argues that the
traditionally minimalist “white cube” aesthetic of the gallery space - that was mimicked by fashion boutiques in the 1990s - is an inadequate model for fashion display, as it is predicated upon notions of disembodiment. The chapter then concluded on examples of Prada’s alternative strategies to referencing “aura” through architecture, arguing that this ultimately benefits the elite cultural cachè of the brand.
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His output as a designer of actual buildings has greatly increased since the construction of the Prada stores, and he is now one of the most sought out “starchitects” in the world.
Chapter Three continues the methodology proposed in Chapter Two of reading the Prada architecture through Benjamin’s text. However, instead of articulating auratic characteristics, this section focuses on the ways in which the architecture can be compared metaphorically with the process of filmmaking. By expounding Benjamin’s argumentation that film is inherently tactile, in its use of “shocks” through montage, this chapter proposes that the architecture - which is already experienced in an embodied manner - is doubly progressive through its engagement with both the visitors bodily senses and by referencing components of film.
Finally, Chapter Four takes this line of reasoning to its natural conclusion by exploring the store’s prominent use of moving-image technologies. Adapting Benjamin’s theories to ubiquitous digital screens, this chapter proposes how the involvement of the visitors body presents them with an alternative experience to shopping in a retail space, as well as fostering an interrelationship between body, tactility and clothing. It ends, however, on an ambivalent note, whereby aura is perhaps made manifest once again, radically, through the very technologies themselves.
Conclusion
There is arguably both an acknowledgement of the capitalist machine that creators are servicing, and an attempt to perhaps introduce counter-measures, but the space and the designers also do not shy away from including the more overtly negative aspects that are associated with aura. In discussion on museums - which form such a prominent role in the Epicenter’s design - Koolhaas acknowledged the more pernicious side of auratic museological practices:
If the Museum has proved anything, it is that you can be a successful institution in mediocre architecture… the most impressive thing about MoMa is its production of aura, I think that, in fact, that it is an important thing to discuss in terms of value, and in terms of [not only] of the past but also the future value. I think that this aura has been achieved through operations of propaganda and, from a very early age, from study in the 1930’s, operations of media manipulation…. I find it slightly bizarre that you see now such reluctance to address the issue of artificiality, the synthetic, and the manipulated, because the Museum in a very serious way was always involved in manipulation. (MoMa, 6)
This comment suggests Koolhaas’ recognition of neither aura, museums or media as entirely earnest, but all in terms of value. The result is a space whose meaning is difficult to parse out, and indeed, it is far more likely that there a multitude of meanings. In its essence - from theory, to materiality, to zoning - the store is conceived, perceived and experienced as heterogeneous, an assemblage of ever changing and shifting modules. Its true radicalism, however, is in its embrace of technology, and its manipulation of it in terms of auratic experience. The end result is therefore
neither solely an attempt at the preservation of aura, cult value and the social status quo, nor only a Marxist attempt at creating an experience for the masses, but both.
Chapter 1:
Introduction
This thesis had its genesis in a curiosity for the relationship between architectural practice, the concept of aura, and luxury fashion. It has built upon my previous work on digital fashion museums in the articles “Digital White Cube: Transferring The Virtual Museum: Transferring the Gallery to Virtual Space” and “Fashioning the Virtual Museum: Exhibiting Fashion in a Digital World”, both of which analysed the Kenzo Fall 2014 Campaign, and The Valentino Garavani Virtual Museum. Some of the insights in Chapter Two draw from these previous works. The arguments I presented were heavily drawn on Walter Benjamin’s salient concept of ‘aura’, though like many writers, my work relied too much on a reductive interpretation of his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1936). While my previous work analysed arguably less
conceptually elaborate spaces, compared to the Prada Epicenter, for which a simplified account of ‘aura’ sufficed, the Prada store necessitates a deeper engagement with Benjamin’s work. In fact, on account of the store’s heterogenous nature, and infatuation with technology, the ‘artwork’ essay, as it is often referred to, has become both the theoretical framework and structuring device through which to asses the multitude of discourses offered through the store’s design. Museology,
minimalism, digital interactivity, materiality and embodiment - the artwork essay enables me to review all of these notions through a single prism. This chapter therefore serves to both establish the concept of ‘aura’ itself, and its deemed importance to the luxury brand sector, but to also radiate beyond this one component - which, in fact, is only a fraction of the complexity offered by Benjamin's magnum opus.
………
Significance in Academia
Benjamin’s essay, published in 1936, can be split into three main core ideas; ‘aura’ as a
standalone concept; aura’s connection to reproduction technologies; and the radical potential of film in the face of fascism. Broadly speaking, this can also be said to be the order of importance placed upon each idea within academic discussions. Overwhelmingly, the concept of ‘aura’ is isolated from the essay, and reinterpreted within a vast variety of contexts. Less frequently, ‘aura’ is also paired with the dichotomy supplied by the essay between traditional artworks and the mechanical arts. Finally, Benjamin’s forceful polemic on the socialist capacity of film - which comprises a large chunk of the ‘artwork’ essay - is usually reserved to film and media studies.
A very reductive translation of Benjamin’s argument in this canonical work can be summarised as; the ‘aura’ of a work of art is the onlookers perception of the objects uniqueness, authenticity and distance. In modernity, mechanical copies of artworks (such as photographs and music recordings) reduce the original artwork’s aura through reproduction. Such a reductive reading, without a wider acknowledgement of the many folds of Benjamin’s text, positions aura as something that is tragically in decline and in need of preservation, with technology as the perpetrator of its demise. Aura’s popularity as a concept is perhaps indebted to Benjamin’s achievement, in developing it as an aesthetic category, in giving expression to a particular, intangible phenomenon that many experienced but had difficulty describing. This is particularly applicable in the case of art, whose prominence in culture had been long felt but hard to justify. In ‘aura’, institutions were given something legitimising and worthy of preservation.
What is aura?
The concept of ‘aura’ amongst Benjamin’s writing is not exclusive to the artwork essay, though it is most frequently cited from there. In her extraordinarily in-depth account, Miriam Bratu Hansen has chased the term over the breadth of Benjamin’s oeuvre, under its many guises. Hansen is careful to underscore that aura is far from a clear and stable concept (Hansen, 339). Rather, its meaning is fluid, and meanders over Benjamin’s various texts depending on his use of it. She establishes three main definitions, two from Benjamin’s work: aura as as “a strange weave of space and time: the unique appearance of a distance, however near it may be”; aura as a form of perception that endows a phenomenon with the “ability to look back at us”; and the third, more traditional meaning of aura “as an elusive phenomenal substance, ether, or halo that surrounds a person or object of perception, encapsulating their individuality and authenticity” (Hansen, 339 - 340). At the core of Hansen’s essay is her historiographic polemic that Benjamin attributed aura to the status of the artwork to establish it as an aesthetic and philosophical category, thus moving it away from the third, and most popular meaning, propagated by esoteric and occultist discourses (which he despised).
The first definition presented by Hansen is, arguably, the most quoted form of Benjamin’s concept. The full passage reads:
“the strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of distance, however near it may be. To follow with the eye - while resting on a summer afternoon - a mountain range on the horizon or a branch that casts its shadow on the beholder is to breathe the aura of those mountain, of that branch. ” (Benjamin, 104-5)
This passage obliquely presents two definitions as aspects of aura. The first that I want to draw out is his description of experiencing aura through “breath”. Contrary to some interpretations, aura is not a concrete property of a given object. Rather, as Hansen argues, it is to be seen as a kind of
perception. In his life long work in trying to understand perception in modernity, Benjamin utilises aura to describe a kind of apperception, almost as an invisible veil around an object that
encourages a contemplative and cerebral from of consciousness. To describe this from of perception as breathing highlights aura’s intangibility, like perceiving air.
The second, and most poignant attribute of aura is Benjamin’s description of it as ‘distance’. Distance can be quite literal and physical. The display of auratic artworks often prohibits touching, thus an artwork is most often perceived optically rather than haptically, limiting its proximity to the human body. It is “unapproachable”. Unapproachability can therefore also be framed as social and cultural distance, as something reserved for the privileged few. Finally, distance is also temporal. Auratic temporal distance is the inscription of an object’s history that separates the object from its present moment. It is the experience of history that extorts the perception of uniqueness,
authenticity and therefore its power and authority. In contrasting auratic artworks to mechanical ones, Benjamin states:
“In even the most perfect reproduction, one thing is lacking: the here and now of the work of art - it’s unique existence in a particular place. It is this unique existence - and nothing else - that bears the mark of the history to which the work has been subject.” (Benjamin,103)
An auratic object thus allows its observer to experience layers of time, through sensing its history while remaining in the present. The sense of history is that spanning distance.
Benjamin’s somewhat meandering essay appears to substitute certain words he attributes to aura at different points, such as “ritual”, “cult-“ and eternal value”, and the notion of beautiful semblance. These form a part of aura’s character through Benjamin’s tracing of the concept back to religious artworks and objects. He contends that aura is made manifest in objects “in the service of magic”, forming a part of rituals and traditions for centuries, thus linking historicity and religion (Benjamin, 108). In modern secularised society, he posits further, this role is supplanted by art, particularly in the philosophy of l’art pour l’art - art that is divorced from any social function or utility, as art for art’s sake. In her article “Sacrality and Aura in the Museum: Mute Objects and Articulate Space”, Joan R. Branham picks up on Benjamin’s connection with liturgy in an overly literal way by
examining the attempts by museum curators to create “accurate” auratic experiences of historically significant religious objects. However, I would argue that Benjamin alludes to theology only in so far as to establish aura’s relation to cult value and therefore systemic power. That is, it is not the religiosity of an object that marries it to aura, but the ritualistic function that religion assigns to it:
“Originally, the embeddedness of an artwork in the context of tradition found expression in a cult. As we know, the earliest artworks originated in the service or rituals - first magical, then religious. And it is highly significant that the artwork’s auratic mode of existence is never entirely severed from its ritual function. In other words:
the unique value of the “authentic” work of art always has its basis in ritual. This ritualistic basis, however mediated it may be, is still recognisable as secularised ritual in even the most profane forms of the cult of beauty.” (Benjamin, 105)
Benjamin, building on his argument, asserts that such ritualistic objects had access to them limited to only those clerics sanctioned with the privilege, and to only certain times and ceremonies, as decried by tradition. Cult value, therefore, derives from an artwork being rare, inaccessible and unattainable save for the few and the privileged - therefore cult value is also the inscription of authenticity. Tradition, in turn, is conservative. It is based upon the maintenance of stasis.
Conservatism relates to notions of autonomy, of self-containment. To be completely autonomous is to not be affected by anything outside of oneself. Therefore, aura’s existence in cult - in tradition - is represented in an artwork’s beautiful semblance, of its completeness and wholeness. An artwork is considered complete - finished, not to be improved upon - and this unity must be preserved back through tradition (as the traditions of museum display). An auratic artwork’s basis in cult is what maintains the art’s autonomy. The context of ritual and tradition propagates the myth of the artworks self-containment, its beautiful semblance, which is expressed through the art’s eternal value, establishing the work as a whole, the ideal artwork encapsulating this materially as
ostensibly created “at a single stroke” or a sculpture carved out of a single piece (Benjamin, 109). While they perhaps do not realise it to such depths, this is what underpins the importance of aura to cultural institutions. To possess an auratic quality is to have self-sustainability and the continuity of cult value by the hand of tradition. Cult value, due to its maintenance through tradition,
designates an objects authenticity and vice versa. An imperative to prove an objects authenticity behoves a reassurance of that objects place in tradition, and therefore stasis. In his application of Benjamin’s theory to the marketing sector, Benoit Heilbrunn attempts to reconcile the notion of aura with reproduced products. In his chapter, “In Search of The Lost Aura: The object in the age of marketing romanticism”, from the book Romancing The Market, Heilbrunn defines aura as an experience of “surprise”, and adopts Benjamin’s theory to propose the prospect of an auratic commercial product, which enables brands to tackle the dilemma of both needing to “erase all surprise (reassurance function) by reducing the distance between consumers and the product” (distance here being both physical and psychological) and, to simultaneously create this distance so that consumers are surprised (innovative function) (Heilbrunn, 191).
Heilbrunn’s appropriation of Benjamin’s essay for the purposes of developing marketing for commercial products is ironic, to say the least, given the intensely Marxist core of Benjamin’s text, though it will prove useful when evaluating Prada’s own approach. The differentiation I intend to establish, however, is the all but omission of Benjamin’s wider debate by the former, and the tactical allusions to it of the latter. On the matter of the socialist potentials of reproductive technologies - that form such a dominant thread in the artwork essay - Heilbrunn merely states:
“the photograph, print or film reel - any number of which can exist - makes cultural experience available to anyone who wishes to participate” (Heilbrunn, 190). Ultimately, however, like many others, Heilbrunn laments the reduction of precious aura that such technologies usher in.
What is perhaps most aggravating about interpretations like Heilbrunn’s is that they seem to miss the point of Benjamin’s essay. More than simply praising technology for bringing pretty pictures to the proletariat, Benjamin actively opposes aura and traditional works of art with mechanical arts for one represents stasis in tradition, whilst the other progress in improvement. Benjamin, in the artwork essay at least, calls for aura’s destruction, tied as it to the notions of beautiful semblance and aesthetic autonomy (Hansen, 357). To have progress one must break tradition. To have progress there must be disunity.
In modernity, aura, according to Benjamin, is in crisis. It is in decline because it is being reduced through the forces of mechanical reproduction: “what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the artwork is the latter’s aura” (Benjamin 104). Benjamin contends that
mechanical reproductions of artworks reduce cult value, that “by replicating the work many times
over, it substitutes a mass existence for a unique existence”, therefore the reproduction becomes
the more common experience of a given work than its traditional form of exhibition - this he terms the artworks “exhibition value” (Benjamin, 104). Hansen has also argued that aura is in fact only made perceptible through technologies of reproduction. That it is only against this new form of perception that we are able to understand the kind of mode of cognisance that aura is intended to be. Aura, as a concept, is therefore contingent on technologies of reproduction.
Benjamin poses the auratic artwork in opposition to what he sees as the productive and socialist potentials of photography and film. Benjamin’s argument regarding technology focuses on two elements: the reproduction of pre-existing artworks, such as photographs of paintings, or
recordings of music; and using reproductive technology to create whole new types of non-auratic art, such as films. The mechanical reproduction affords two advantages over a hand-reproduction. First, the reproduction is able to have values of its own, not available in the original, such as being able to show something that the eye cannot see, for example, an enlargement of a small detail, or an action in slow motion7. The second element is the ability of the reproduction to enable the artwork to “meet the recipient half-way”, to close that distance by being enjoyed in the recipients place of comfort, so that “[t]he cathedral leaves its site to be received in the studio of an art lover; the choral work performed in an auditorium or in the open air is enjoyed in a private room”
(Benjamin 103). By being placed in these new contexts and forms, the artwork therefore is no longer in the service of ritual that upholds its power.
7 We can think here of Edward Muybridge’s famous proto-films which began as a wager to find out wether a there is a
However, for Benjamin, the most potent adoption of these new inventions is the creation of new artworks, of which he thinks film has the potential to be the most ideologically potent. He stresses that a film artwork is created not during the act of shooting but in the editing. It is the process of montage, forming the bedrock of his argumentation, which he is most inspired with. In contrast to the unity and eternal value of auratic artwork, film, he argues, has the greatest “capacity for improvement” (Benjamin, 112). A film is an assemblage of many parts and its modular nature retains the potential for reconstruction and change. He uses the example of the actor, whose “performance is by no means a unified whole, but is assembled from many individual
performances” (Benjamin 112-3). The resulting reduction in unity and wholeness is transformed into a reduction in the cult and tradition of eternal value - of autonomy - in favour of collective experience. “Nothing shows more graphically that art has escaped the realm of “beautiful semblance” which for so long was regarded as the only sphere in which it could thrive” (Benjamin,113).
Benjamin’s discussion on the function of film is twofold - on the literal and metaphorical levels. On the one hand, he believes that film has the capacity to transform modes of perception towards the emancipation of the masses, “to train human beings in the apperceptions and reactions needed to
deal with a vast apparatus whose role in their lives is expanding almost daily.” (Benjamin, 108) He
argues that as the invisible spectator, it is the audience, the masses, who have control and
authority. In film, he sees a new democratic potential for spreading information and knowledge, for the masses to see themselves and witness their own lives. This is what he means by the right that “any person today can claim to being filmed” (Benjamin 114). This links this with his work on “the author as producer”, for as technologies of media evolve and proliferate, everyone has the chance to be published, because for everyone to be able to read means that everyone has also the learned the power to write - “literary competence is no longer founded on specialised higher education but on polytechnic training, and this is common property” (Benjamin, 114). Similarly with film, as a mass medium, its specialised language of editing (particularly Soviet films) is vicariously learned by all, and therefore all can lay claim to representation.
On the other hand, film and the productive industry around it also performs as a symbol for the current state and dangers of Fascist thinking, and this is where Benjamin concludes his essay with a warning. Susan Buck-Morss presents a most compelling argument, dissecting this final symbolic analysis by Benjamin in her essay “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered”. Benjamin, she argues, sees a danger in the current production of studio films, which hide their construction through continuity editing, and show artifice and illusion to the masses. For him, films should reflect the conditions of every day life, so as to understand themselves and the forces that are denying them their rights. He warns that in creating the
phantasmagoria of cinema, there becomes an aestheticization of politics - that is, a hiding of fascism in a veil of spectacle that performs as a distraction to the ideologies beneath it (Buck-Morss, 22). In response, he argues for a politicisation of art - art that formally awakens the
spectators senses, and therefore allows it to use power to emancipate themselves. In the artwork essay, therefore, aura is ultimately an instrument of fascism in its upholding of tradition and cult value, and for that reason it is the target of Benjamin's renunciation.
The application of Benjamin’s work in this thesis is at once both broad and restrictive. I intend to extract the definition - and theoretical conclusions - of aura that are presented in the artwork essay
only. Therefore, taking a similarly Marxist approach, aura is ultimately considered within the realm
of the conservative and in the service of tradition and capitalism, in opposition to progress and the emancipation of the proletariat. Firstly, this assures a clarity to my argumentation that would be difficult if I were to extend aura’s meaning as, for example, Miriam Hansen has done. Secondly, this enables me to argue that the Prada store is not necessarily an engagement with the concept of aura per se, but with Benjamin’s artwork essay overall. However, while it is only focussing on the artwork essay, this thesis endeavours to use it thoroughly, beyond its contribution to the concept of aura, by touching upon many aspects of Benjamin’s seminal text that are often overlooked by other authors. Finally, by looking at the Prada store as a comprehensive theoretical engagement with the essay, I am able to account for the store’s dialectical and paradoxical nature, as it broaches both sides of Benjamin’s polemic through its complex architectural strategies. The following three chapters aim to illustrate the ways in which fashion spaces can engage their architecture with theory, beginning with reference to, perhaps, the most obvious of auratic spaces - the museum.
Chapter 2:
Luxury is “Waste”
“Waste”
In a real estate context where every square meter counts, the ultimate luxury is
wasted space. Space that is not “productive” - not shopping - affords
contemplating, privacy, mobility, and luxury.
Projects for Prada Volume 1
Despite its many innovations and avant-garde tendencies, the Prada Epicenter is still subject to its contextual history and environment. Of particular significance to the design of the space was the reference to museums, substantiated both by specific mention in the Projects for Prada book, and in its affiliation with the Guggenheim, whose previous Soho branch the store now occupies. As this chapter aims to demonstrate, however, Prada as not alone, or even the first, to be inspired by the architecture of these centres of culture. The growing interest in minimalist architecture by fashion houses in the 1990s offered an avenue for reconstructing the relatedness between museum space and aura to the benefit of the brand, which the OMA/Prada collaboration both extends from, but also, to a degree, rejects. As such, this chapter first seeks to introduce the more commonly articulated forms of the dynamic between museum, aura and retail, before embarking on a close analysis of Prada’s own vision of this relationship.
………
Fashion and Museums
A crucial change that occurred in the decade or so prior to the construction of the first Prada Epicenter, was the rapid increase in the inclusion of fashion by elite cultural institutions, such as museums and public galleries. A detailed overview of the interplay between fashion and museums is beyond the scope of this essay, though suffice to say it has become an increasingly prominent topic amongst academic circles, with prominent work produced over the last fifteen years by, among many others, Marie Riegels Melchior and Birgitta Svensson (2014), Valerie Steele (1998)
and numerous articles in Fashion Theory, and it even being the subject of discussion of major conferences such as “Fashion in museums: past, present and future” held at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam in 2016.
In summary, a climate of significant reorientation set in amongst cultural institutions in the 1990s which led to a rapid interest in fashion. Post-modernism marked the start of the erosion of cultural hierarchies and, coupled with socio-economic pressures on museums to generate more income, prompted a novel inclusion of fashion as way of garnering interest and attracting visitors
(Anderson, 372). For fashion, this meant a new-found acceptance within high-brow circles from which it had previously been exempt, having been relegated to a craft at best, and frivolous entertainment at worst. Fiona Anderson writes in Melchior and Svenssons edited volume Fashion
and Museums, on the historical perception of fashion prior to this change;
Fashion, then, occupied a precarious position between its status on the one hand as a creative product of labour and an illustration of the good taste of its wearer, and on the other that invoked by its intrinsic relationship to the body, which solidly damned it as linked to the base, the sexual and most definitely the ‘lower pleasures.’ (Anderson, 373)
Thus, fashion, on account of its proximity to the body and the corporal sensorium, is explained to be notably absent from inclusion in museums, described by Susan Stewart as “an elaborate ritualised practice of refraining from touch” (quoted in Dorrian, 187). Anderson adds, however, that “the social and cultural shifts which led to the current postmodern epoch have significantly raised the cultural status of fashion and transformed connotations of the body, and pleasure, generally into largely positive ones” (Anderson, 373). While I share a degree of a consensus with Anderson on the last point, that the growing interest in fashion has coincided with a “materialist turn” in contemporary discourse, it is my contention that this is a distinctly recent development. The convergence of fashion and museology back in the 1990s was still largely through an ongoing denial and repression of fashion’s link to the body, by keeping fashion objects static and outside of tactile engagement - a situation that then refracted back in to the fashion world itself.
While there is indeed much collaboration between the personnel in the fields of fashion and museums today, in their infancy fashion exhibitions did not necessarily receive creative input on their presentation from the fashion world itself, such as from specific creative directors. What is of interest to me, then, is the decisions on spatial presentation made contemporaneously by luxury fashion brands themselves, decisions which I believe also reflect the changing cultural and hierarchical dynamics. In Fashion Retail, Eleanor Curtis describes the aesthetics of minimalist fashion boutiques, which came to be the dominant style of the 1990’s;
The minimalist store acts as a beautifully crafted empty shell for the display of beautifully crafted objects… In some ways, this emptiness could be said to be the perfect environment for garments and their accessories to be viewed, admired and purchased.(Curtis, 9)
This passage highlights how the minimalist environment was designed to place all focus on the objects in the store and, crucially, for the experience of them to be optical - “viewed and admired” - rather than haptic. For example, Calvin Klein and Georgio Armani chose minimalist architects John Pawson and Claudio Silvestrin to compliment the clean lines of the brands’ clothing (Curtis, 9). This spatial experience of cultural objects closely aligns with the kind of experience that was dominant in museum and gallery design, often referred to as “The White Cube”.
White Cube Paradigm
In his book Inside The White Cube: The Ideology of The Gallery Space, Brian O’Doherty asserts that the paradigmatic look of while walls and sparse settings is “an ideal space that, more than any picture, may be the archetypal image of twentieth century art” (O’Doherty, 14). Minimal gallery space was first introduced in the 1920’s, and popularised a decade later with The Museum of Modern Art, New York, designed by Philip L. Goodwin and Edward Durell Stone, becoming
MoMa’s permanent home in 1939. Michaela Giebelhausen, in her chapter “The Architecture Is The Museum” from the anthology volume New Museum Theory, argues that MoMa invented what O’Doherty would later dub the “white cube” aesthetic; “spaces that aimed to focus attention on the individual work of art. Plain white walls, neutral floors, no architectural decoration. In short, nothing to distract from the delicate act of contemplation” (Giebelhausen, 55).
Contributing to the ubiquity of this aesthetic throughout most of the twentieth century, I believe, is its articulation of the ideal conditions for the performance of aura (Dorrian, 187). Firstly, both aura and the minimalist gallery space demand certain ritualistic behaviours found in temples and places of worship, such as “hushed tones, reverent observation, and processional gaits” (Branham, 42). The allusion to religion will become prevalent again in discussing Prada. More importantly for the moment, is the similarity in the perception of the artwork via aura and the white cube;
contemplative, immersed and, crucially, disembodied. In the artwork essay, Benjamin establishes aura as a perception of distance, in opposition to nearness, stating that “distance is the opposite of closeness” (quoted in Branham, 33). In putting aura in opposition to film, which he argues to be tactile and sensory, Benjamin therefore establishes auratic distance as one of disembodiment. Similarly, O’Doherty’s description of spectatorship in the gallery space argues that presence before an artwork means to absent oneself in favour of the Eye, where optical perception, the most
closely linked to the cerebral, takes precedence over all other senses, adding that “the presence of that odd piece of furniture, your own body, seems superfluous, an intrusion” (O’Doherty, 15).
A final salient point made by O’Doherty is the relationship between the white cube and the social group that it is ultimately constructed for; a specific caste or tribe, referring to the metropolitan elites and upper classes who possess the required pre-existing knowledge to “read” a work solely on its own merits, building on the arguments of Bourdieu; “A work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code into which it is
encoded” (quoted in Ryan, 8). The aesthetics of The White Cube perform precisely as that kind of code. Similarly, by placing auratic artworks in opposition to the mass media consumed by the proletariat, Benjamin also obliquely suggests that aura is preserved for and by the privileged. In perpetuation of the cult of tradition, aura obliquely reinforces the existing status quo. Ergo, in the adoption of the white cube aesthetic by fashion boutiques, the ideological aspirations are quite apparent. To remediate the space (or, even, the medium ) for auratic art is to attempt replicating the perception of aura around the fashion objects contained within - to imbue them with
uniqueness, authenticity and cult value (which, inevitably, translates into monetary value). However, there are several distinct limitations in this strategy. Firstly, it depends on a rather
reductive interpretation of aura, one that is arguably closer to its esoteric or spiritual connotations - such as a halo - and omitting the temporal dimension attributed to aura by Benjamin. As Hansen corroborates, “the ‘unique distance’ that appears to the beholder is of a temporal dimension” (Hansen, 344). Aura relates to the history inscripted on an object. The white cube generally can be said to work counter to the invocation of an auratic experience as it purposefully removes the object from any context. Its progenitor, MoMa, Giebelhausen writes, “was a museum in flux. Unlike its nineteenth-century predecessors, it had no desire to write permanent histories” (Giebelhausen, 54). This is also the crux of Branham’s investigation into the display of religious (auratic) objects and within museums, which she argues implicitly decontextualise the object, therefore “purging them of original function and significance” (Branham, 33). In addition, in borrowing this aesthetic in an attempt to build cultural cachè, fashion, ironically, reveals itself to be behind the times, as criticism of the white cube, such as O’Doherty’s, but many more besides, had already been circulating in the art world since the 1970s.8
The most troublesome result of this convergence, however, is the omission of the body, the sensory experience, within the fashion establishments. As Joanne Entwistle attempts to establish, fashion is ultimately an embodied and sensory practice. To divorce from tactile perception is to deny an authentic experience of fashion, and therefore limit this experience only to those who can
8 This arguably also relates to Marcel Duchamp’s urinal, which attempted demonstrate how arbitrarily the museum space
and environment transformed objects in to items of veneration (Heilbrunn 188). Duchamp is overall a figure of much interest to the subject of this thesis, though outside its scope, but he presents an intriguing avenue for further exploration.
afford the price tag9. Ultimately, this spatial configuration is not politically progressive,
emancipatory or productive. I present this analysis not so much as counter-example to the later strategies employed by Koolhaas and Prada, but to describe the climate that the Prada store emerged from, taking some elements with it, as well as rejecting others.
“Aura-tising” Prada
To begin on the comparisons, several writers have commented on the sparse interior of the store; Carolyn de la Peña, in her rigorous material analysis, comments that the interior’s sparse display shelves and large empty spaces bring up the question of what is actually for sale (de la Peña, 115). Dirk van den Huevel is even more critical, arguing that ‘the large and unfurnished space at street level is said to be too empty… [that] the store is not experienced as intimate, but too sterile and open to feel at ease and comfortable” (van den Huevel, 118). This suggests that some of the features of slick minimalism that characterise the white cube resurface here, eliciting particular affects and social behaviours. In the book documenting the project, the spatial vacancy of the store is confirmed as entirely intentional, though it is reframed, cryptically, as “waste”:“In a real estate context where every square meter counts, the ultimate luxury is wasted space. Space that is not “productive” - not shopping - affords contemplating, privacy, mobility, and luxury” (Projects for
Prada). Of particular importance is Prada/OMA’s ambition to reorientation the meaning of “luxury”.
Most often associated with notions of comfort, traditional glamour, and great expense, luxury might come across as discordant to the concept of aura. However, in the Prada-Universe, luxury is remodelled to its other meaning, as something that is only granted rarely. Therefore, rarely is the New Yorker able to experience space that has not had every inch of it filled by matter. That has wider ramifications, for it argues that also rarely does a person in modernity enter a space that has no set meaning, no utility, that is no ‘productive’. Therefore, this non-productive pace, like l’art pour
l’art, exists for only its own sake. Poignantly, therefore, also as l’art pour l’art intends, wasted space
“affords contemplating”, as it doesn’t enforce upon the visitor other things to do or observe, existing as it does without distractions, by rejecting decoration in favour of a style described as a “synthesis of thought” (Projects for Prada). As such, luxury is reframed as the rarity of unproductive space that places the cerebral over the sensory, transforming aura into a luxury experience.
These elements contribute to an articulation of auratic experience though architecture via reference to a contemplative state of mind, evoked by minimal architecture. However, if that connection was missed, the store also makes the interrelation far more conspicuous through an inclusion of an ‘aura room’. One of three smaller linked areas, the ‘aura room’ is a stark, unadorned
9
The spatial design present psychological barriers that usually means that only those who can afford it even enter the store, never mind try anything on.
room with white walls and simple seating, described by de la Peña as a “shrine” to Prada. The veneration of worship that is expected from such a space is evoked through “a combination of product displays, information screens, and past fashion-show footage” so shoppers can explore the history of Prada (de la Peña 127). The emphasis on history in a room labelled “aura” is surely no coincidence but, quite the opposite, it demonstrates what I believe to be a clear and deep engagement with Benjamin’s text which, as I have already argued in the previous chapter, predicated auratic distance as temporal and linked with history. Of value to note here, is the definition provided for “History” in the Projects For Prada glossary of terms; “History - Prada has aura without obligation. It is not burdened by one inflexible image”. What is quite remarkable about the Prada/OMA interpretation in the aura room is that this points towards an attitude that the
construction of aura does not necessarily take precedence over demonstrating a comprehension of its meaning through architecture (not least because of the irony of filling an “aura” room with
technologies of reproduction), arguably, because Prada believes aura to be an already existing and inherent component of its image. Rather, this definition suggests that the aura of Prada is so embedded within the brand, that it is not obligated to the cult of tradition for its propagation. At the same time, as already briefly touched upon, the space continues to remediate elements of the white cube, including its links to religious structures as first proposed by O’Doherty when he compared the gallery to a medieval church (O’Doherty, 15). In describing the experience of visiting the room, de la Peña states;
As one enters a dimly lit modern shrine to Prada’s past or sits on a solitary Prada cube watching the Virgin Mary, one need not believe Prada is God to have something akin to a spiritual experience. (de la Peña, 127)
Crucially, de la Peña highlights the experience of the secularised religion of fashion, echoing O’Doherty’s conception of the non-religious temples of the gallery space, his sentiment itself an offspring of Benjamin’s claim to a “theology of art” which arises out of the crisis of aura set on by the invention of photography. Koolhaas himself links religious and auratic experience explicitly when he describes the aura room as a space “‘‘where the more religiously inclined Prada customer can commune with the Prada aura in an intimate and immersive manner’’ (quoted in de la Peña, 127).
The link to religion in the aura room is achieved through immateriality - a remove of texture, colour and objects, in favour of a sparsity and, especially, whiteness, which has historical links to notions of purity and truth (Crewe, 2098). However, Lev Manovich contends that the religious is also evoked through a particular staging of objects, such as the glass cages. Upon entering the store, visitors are first struck by a number of glass cages hanging from the ceiling which house
mannequins in Prada merchandise. Manovich compares these to “relics of saints in special displays”, with the clothes now becoming “objects of worship”. For him, this is Koolhaas’ ironic
statement about brands functioning as new religions (Manovich 234), however, this strikes me as a somewhat reductive reading. Rather, I’d argue that the cages are a part of a general strategy where the objects that Prada is, implicitly, most concerned with making desirable - that is the clothes themselves - are articulated through cult value and distance, as is performed here by keeping the mannequins behind glass and out of reach from the general masses. In a similar vein, there have been a number of comments (de la Peña, van den Huevel) regarding the allocation of space throughout the store, with the empty main floor contrasted with the basement where most of the objects for sale are actually kept. de la Peña goes as far as to say that this is where ‘real’ shoppers go10. She even wonders, “what is it at Prada that’s actually for sale?” Once again, such staging could be a way of driving cult value, by redirecting attention away from the clothes, hiding them away in the basement like “certain sculptures on medieval cathedrals [that] are not visible to the viewer at ground level” (Benjamin 106).
Cages, image source: http://yamamotodesignstudio.com/data/2013/11/8/prada-ny-by-rem-koolhaas
It is important to affirm, however, that the aim here is not to construct auratic objects, per se, (as Heilbrunn aspires to), such as a painting, for example, substituted as a dress. The intention of the store is to reassure the buying Prada customers, or perhaps what Koolhaas has described as “the more religiously inclined”, of the aura of the fashion house itself (quoted in de la Peña, 127). That is, in response to the over-extension of the brand, particularly through the establishment of a number of identical looking stores, the Epicenter, in its reconstruction of an auratic experience through the various strategies described here, serves as a reminder of the premier status of Prada
