[This text was previously published by the author in Portuguese on Contemporânea Magazine — Ed.]
I don’t want to work with fashion. Beauty must be preserved from capitalism. Fashion favours the escape into personal, private, selected, chosen space, as a form of false self-determination. Fashion reflects the fear of losing’ identity. — Thomas Hirschhorn
The purposelessness of the great modern work of art thrives on the anonymity of the market. —Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer
In the well-known study Haute Couture and High Culture, Pierre Bourdieu sets out the structural homology between the field of fashion and that of legitimate culture, within which he situates art. Arguing that in this relationship of correspondence what is at stake is not the rarity of the product but rather that of the producer, the brand, the signature, and the proper name, the sociologist makes explicit this long-standing mobilisation of the system of relations that the game produces. The more complex and concealed the circuit of consecration, the more powerful it becomes. Like art, haute couture likewise aspires to a monopoly on legitimate violence, and it is through the validation of this invisible form that symbolic power is equally exercised.
It is a well-established and widely studied fact that, since the nineteenth century, many artists have been drawn to the universe of fashion, just as many capitalists — some of whom were simultaneously collectors — already used art as a means of promoting their products. We know that the convergence between artists and fashion designers intensified throughout the twentieth century, when the artistic field was already constituted. Fashion creators continue, in ever-growing numbers, to tighten their relations with the agents and structures of legitimation within the art world. This is not merely some magical form of empathy — luxury brands, possessing strong economic capital, imitate the structures and institutions of production and reproduction of that field. They appropriate auction houses, museums, and foundations, consolidating their influence both in the global art market and in the increasingly visible trajectories of multiple artists. In this way, the alliance helps to strengthen the regime of capital expansion. Operating between the creative and financial industries, art and fashion unite in the accumulation strategy of investors. Between the stylist-collector, turned specialist, and the stylist-artist, it is the collage and appropriation of the symbolic capital recognised in the field of art — above all, the fetish of the name and the mystification of the unique, auratic object converted into a griffe — that, by securing their influence in the market and in organisations such as museums, reconfigure and determine the logics of domination. Through the de-functionalisation of what they produce, such professionals believe they have found the place for their work of art, the status of artist, and the much-desired prestige. Everyone deconstructs, whatever the extra-Derridean meaning fashion assigns to it, aspiring to inscribe themselves in the territory of social and cultural distinction — the work does not follow function, the sign operates the conditions of its own impossibility, clothing becomes an aporia. Returning to Mauss, Bourdieu tells us that, as in magical representations, the driving force is belief — collective belief.
After the 1980s, according to Raymonde Moulin,¹ the individual act of collecting becomes less visible, giving way to the names of the major luxury brands, which assume a clearly intentional strategic purpose. Associated with the great collectors — who simultaneously sit on the boards of major multinationals — they also participate in museum boards of directors and concentrate capital that operates in the competitive international financial markets, including that of contemporary art. By sponsoring artists’ work, the large corporations donate works to museums, participate as shareholders in the powerful auction houses, and establish relationships of interest with critics, curators, gallery directors, art fairs, and biennials. In this way, they contribute to the imposition of dominant and institutionalised representations of art, of value, and of legitimate and legitimated artistic practices, thereby accentuating structural asymmetries.² The known examples are countless and profusely publicised, which spares us the need to enumerate them. Indeed, it would be almost an exception not to find, at present, the aforementioned magical collaborations that shape this bureaucratic organisation. By playing a decisive role in the promotion of artists’ careers through the acquisition of works and the creation or funding of prizes, they contribute to the overvaluation of those works, which obviously means enhancing the corresponding corporate capital of the investor. Thanks to the conversion of capitals — economic capital transformed into cultural capital — fashion and art operate, to speak in Bourdieu’s terms, an economy of symbolic goods through which the social order acquires another meaning and perpetuates structures of distinction. These dynamics of domination and intersection between art, fashion, and capitalism form the modus operandi, a sophisticated strategy of legitimation of power and governability for these elites. The social status of luxury belonging to a minority becomes a symbol of exclusivity and a sociological mechanism of recognition.
In this regard,³ we may highlight the Pinault Collection, which holds the largest collection of contemporary art in the world and operates several exhibition spaces between Venice and Paris. The Fondazione Prada and the Fondation Cartier offer extensive programmes encompassing multiple artistic practices beyond the visual arts. The Fondation Louis Vuitton presents major temporary exhibitions that extend beyond its own collection. Among the major corporate collectors from the fashion industry are agents such as François Pinault (majority shareholder of the Kering Group), Bernard Arnault (majority shareholder and CEO of LVMH), Miuccia Prada (creative director and majority shareholder of the Prada Group), and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (managed by the Cartier Group). These financial groups are increasingly expanding into other geographies and markets. Another distinctive feature of these collections is their relationship with architecture. All their buildings were designed or renovated by Pritzker Prize laureates. By way of example, consider the Bourse de Commerce building, renovated by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. This feature is homologous to their approaches to art and constitutes yet another symbolic intensification of the respective collections. Kantian disinterestedness vanishes in the mirage of business. Not only do the major brands and luxury groups possess their own contemporary art foundations, but they also give carte blanche to designers to interpret and reinterpret specific proposals, thus mimicking the field of art.⁴ Museums dedicate retrospectives to validated names from the fashion world, programming exhibitions that function as performative catwalks or tableaux vivants; famous artists design sets ranging from the epic to the unusual in which brands present their collections, or are invited to produce works inspired by fashion shows. Museums that traditionally cultivate classical art, the relationship with history or with heritage, propose dialogues with contemporary style and luxury houses — fashion, by promoting false equivalences, transfigures models into performers and the exhibition space into a space of representation in which meaning is reduced to the subliminal mechanism of illusion. Through it, the act of wearing luxury clothing assumes the communicational power of turning life into a work of art. The resemblance knows no limits, and desire, understood as visionary, merely perpetuates the modus vivendi.
The operations of soul migration between different bodies are ever more frequent. Collaborative exchanges — supposedly inclusive too — between brands and artists, financial transactions, and the persuasive advertising languages at the service of the global aestheticisation of the world, serve everyone and configure the capitalist corporation. There is no shortage of entertainment, festivity, glamour, style, and much dazzlement. Specialised magazines, furnishing the photographic evidence of the spectacle, bring the public closer and ensure the cult at a distance, the empathy, and the care. The communication is auratic, sacralising, and rhetorical. Modelled on education and mediation services, accessibility aims to be democratic but also a global requirement framed within the supposed and necessary construction of a new, egalitarian world — the messianic vocation has reached the luxury business, which discovers a philanthropic impulse in galas, charity dinners, and other events to which socially responsible objectives are attributed. To recognise this system of self-identification is to legitimise the institution that promotes it and to guarantee the ideal mirror it holds up to itself. The machine that excludes is the same one that manipulates through persuasion. Contemporary art fairs promote encounters with fashion, illustrating this old love affair dressed up as an interdisciplinary vocation, just as art biennials seasonally promote socially, economically, and politically respectable trends. Art and style want nothing less than flawless finishes, without defects, just as is expected of so much social responsibility, sustainability, and the understanding of a shared atelier — the trend semantics:
Illusion is not false, for it does not use false signs; it uses senseless signs. This is what trompe-l’œil does: by adding the illusion of the real to painting, it is, in a certain sense, more false than the false — it is a simulacrum of the second degree. […] The false merely intrigues our sense of the true; the more-false-than-false carries us beyond itself, delighting us without appeal. […] In the movement of seduction (we also think of the work of art), it is as though the false shone forth from all the power of the true.⁵
To abandon oneself to this illusion of signs and to the vortex of artifice as an organised force is a symptom of the captivating vocation of that “tactile power,” to invoke an increasingly relevant notion from Jean Baudrillard.
In this geopolitical game of high finance that traverses the relations between art and fashion, the exhibition of Anne Imhof at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art does not go unnoticed. Inaugurated on 12 December 2025, Fun ist ein Stahlbad, whose direct translation into Portuguese, as can be read in the gallery handout, is O divertimento é um banho de aço [Fun is a steel bath],⁶ departs from Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s idea that “fun is a medicinal bath that the pleasure industry never ceases to prescribe.”⁷ Appropriating certain well-known critical readings that those authors develop around the culture and leisure industries, entertainment and happiness, labour, discipline, control, and freedom, the artist proposes — more evidently in some works than in others — to carry out a kind of objectification of some of the well-known positions of Adorno and Horkheimer. Works produced specifically for this exhibition are placed in dialogue with works already belonging to certain collections. To the due artistic consecration at the Serralves Museum there is no lack of a reasonable number of works from galleries such as Sprüth Magers, or indeed from the Pinault Collection (the latter acknowledged prominently in the text accompanying the exhibition), which, besides reinforcing the artist’s presence in the museum, further contributes to her valorisation and the control of supply.
What interests us here is not to present a critique of the exhibition but rather to understand the extent to which it shows us that the “love of art,” to speak in Bourdieu’s terms, is like money: it demands monumental scale (as we can observe in the majority of the works on display at the Serralves Museum, maximised in the image of profit and in the form of the speculative logic of capital). Between a certain critical resistance that seems to want to traverse the exhibition and the pleasure industry that it suggests in the Serralves shop, it is the ideology of entertainment that wins out.
There, one can find for sale a set of three studies skateboards (€460), a waves skateboard (€170), another paper skateboard (€170), a black tote bag (€22.90), assorted t-shirts, long- and short-sleeved, caps, and other fetishes including zines at €22.90 (compiling visual and literary materials from 2001–2003 that offer an intimate glimpse into the early stages of her career), as well as vinyl records. Between the imposing sculptural work that opens the exhibition, the grandeur of the diving platform, the insignificant occupation of the black iron pool — or the drawings, paintings, bronzes, and a four-channel video⁸ that add nothing to what the exhibition sets out to achieve — what stands out is a kind of visual persuasion, the extension of the inoffensive and at times even decorative character of the structures and constructive decisions of those media. Added to this is their mere formalist reduction, adjusted to what the museum space, in its old tradition, seems to demand. If, as in luxury fashion, the work does not follow function, so too the recourse to the argumentative framework and conceptual possibilities of the Frankfurt School per se finds no materialisation in the exhibition’s layout, nor does it serve any “enlightenment.” The curator writes that the “artist problematises the place of popular culture.” This being so, how can we frame, within the perspective of the aforementioned philosophers, all this absolute merchandise that takes the exhibition as its reference and contributes to annulling its critical value? How can we reconcile these proposals with the accusations against the administered world? In this libidinal economy, the exhibition transforms itself into a biopolitical apparatus capitalised through the enhanced mobilisation between the creative and financial industries, to which the artist’s practice in the territory of fashion is by no means foreign.
Art and fashion remain united in the accumulation strategy of investors as a form of socio-political regulation: it was also Adorno and Horkheimer who wrote that talents already belong to the industry before being presented by it, and that is one of the reasons why they integrate with one another with such devotion:
Only the obligation to insert oneself ceaselessly into business life as an aesthetic expert, under the most drastic of threats, definitively curbed the artist. Once, they used to sign their letters, like Kant and Hume, as “your most humble servant,” while at the same time undermining the foundations of throne and altar. Today they address heads of government by their first names and are subject, in each of their artistic impulses, to the judgement of their illiterate masters. The analysis Tocqueville made a hundred years ago has been fully confirmed in the meantime. Under the private monopoly of culture, “tyranny leaves the body free and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: you will think as I do or die. He says: you are free not to think as I do; your life, your goods, all shall remain yours, but from this day forth you shall be a stranger among us.”⁹
Fulfilling the Zeitgeist, Imhof has worked with brands such as Balenciaga, Burberry, and Valentino, and has already seen a performance sponsored by Nike, including the special edition of a football jersey bearing her own name (all widely publicised on her social media and in fashion, sport, and design magazines). In HYPEBEAST magazine, we can read that Anne Imhof launched her first collaboration with Nike, reimagining a collection of the iconic cult T90 t-shirts, inspired by her recent performance DOOM: House of Hope. We read that, inspired by Romeo & Juliet, the collection explores rivalry and desire between two rival houses and draws on the colour palettes of the show’s costumes. Punk-pop star LIA LIA wears the “House of Tigers” uniform in black and blue, while Berlin rapper ATK44 represents the “House of Wolves” in a red long-sleeved t-shirt printed with a wolf’s head. The pieces display the DOOM crest on the chest and maintain the classic style with the inscription “IMHOF 25” on the back. As for the Anne Imhof T90 jersey, it was reportedly launched on 13 September, and, as a way of immortalising, the brand announced it would stage a live “Battle of the Bands” at Kühlhaus Berlin, with LIA LIA and ATK44 reprising their roles as leaders of their respective houses. Nothing resembles a terrain of debris more than these instrumentalising alliances. Between one of the “best artists of the year” and one of the “best of fashion” of 2025, everything is rendered equivalent under the logic of trivial consensus. The aura takes the name of “luxury,” itself likewise unrepeatable and unique. Art, as a financial instrument, assumes its place in the hierarchy of inequalities.
Of course, all of this, in the artist’s habitual discourse about her practice, oscillates between justifications that simultaneously claim the autonomy of art, the need to make her work accessible to all and removed from the world of elites, and a glamorous and financial coexistence with those very elites. If we recall that the Kering Group is a multinational led by François Pinault that includes brands such as Gucci, Saint Laurent, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, and Alexander McQueen, we will readily understand that the circle of power is closed and the artist is trapped inside it. Everything is hybrid; the entertainment is well-intentioned and authentic, compatible with rebellion and at the mercy of an organised freedom. In a single tone, we find the perfect consonance between the irresistible and eccentric protest against the tedious status quo and the solemn cynicism that promises to resist what oppresses. The objective complicity between the financial elite, the market, and the supposed critical radicality is evident.
In 1983, Peter Sloterdijk, in his important work Critique of Cynical Reason, mentions that kynicism and cynicism are constants of our history and therefore are never out of fashion. This long-standing ambition configures the currently dominant programme of a cynicism understood in one of its versions — that of “enlightened false consciousness,” practised as an expanded action with considerable ingenuity and little art. Walter Benjamin, in his analyses of Baudelaire, had already emphasised that the poet possessed a genuine awareness of the situation in which, at that time, the man of letters lived: “he is the flâneur who heads to the market telling himself he is going to see what is happening; but in truth, he is already looking for a buyer.”¹⁰ In the new contemporary odyssey, this masquerade has become banal and aspires to totality. Sloterdijk recounts that Gustav Regler, after marrying the daughter of the owner of a large department store, was forced to accept a serious position in his company, where he began as an apprentice tailor and later became director. There he learned, says Regler, quoted by the philosopher, to smile and lie, to be gentle and energetic, to calculate and measure, to know the extravagances of fashion, the psychology of employees, union demands, and government regulations: “I moved further and further away from the people to whom, five years earlier, I had devoted myself without their having asked me, and further and further away from myself.”¹¹ One of the socio-psychological profiles of the contemporary cynic no longer seems to be the expectation that divided consciousness will unify. The ambivalent representation between pose and game, demagogy and convenience, seduction and cunning, has become the safety margin for all specialists in the techniques of lullabies. Like Gustav Regler, they are “nice people” who have learned to survive in the emptying out of themselves. Cynicism knows no guilt.
These fatal strategies, to take up the apt title of a work by Baudrillard, offer us the cold, calculated, and masked ecstasy, the ritual of appearances — and this is anything but “fun.”
Footnotes
1. See Raymonde Moulin, Le marché de l’art. Mondialisation et nouvelles technologies (Paris: Flammarion, 2009). The author writes that “the uncertainty linked to authenticity — and which concerns the relationship between the work and its author — is compounded by the factor of uncertainty associated with the instability (…) of aesthetic values. (…) The permanent revision of the scale of values obeys complex motives in which fashions, the influence of contemporary aesthetic values, the progress of scholarly research, and the interests of dealers are intertwined,” p. 20.
2. “These unique art goods constitute the ideal type of rare goods whose accomplished differentiation confers a monopoly, in the etymological sense of the term, upon their holder.” In Raymonde Moulin, op. cit., p. 15.
3. See, in this regard, the study developed by Henrique Grimaldi Figueiredo, “A indústria da moda e o mercado da arte contemporânea: um debate introdutório & conversas com Olivier de Sagazan” [The Fashion Industry and the Contemporary Art Market: An Introductory Debate & Conversations with Olivier de Sagazan], in Todas as Artes — Revista da Faculdade de Letras, Universidade do Porto, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2020. [https://ojs.letras.up.pt/index.php/taa/article/view/8909].
4. As Raymonde Moulin notes, power games are not self-evident. They take into account the framing of the work and its capacity to dialogue with other works in the collection, its durability, the possibility of resale and loan to important museums, the critics and curators who have already written about or worked with the artist, among other factors. Entry into the field and the symbolic legitimation of the artist implies a set of prior conditions. Thus, artists who do not participate in these rituals of consecration find it difficult to obtain the much-desired recognition, at least within this institutionalised space.
5. Jean Baudrillard, Les stratégies fatales (Paris: Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 1983), pp. 57–58.
6. In the gallery handout signed by the exhibition’s curator, Inês Grosso, we can read: “In the more accessible Portuguese translation of this work, the expression is rendered as ‘Fun is a medicinal bath that the pleasure industry never ceases to prescribe.’” And further: “In German, ‘Stahlbad’ means ‘chalybeate bath’ and designates therapeutic treatments with iron-rich waters, carried out at spa resorts to strengthen the body, combat anaemia, or states of weakness. The term results from the combination of ‘Stahl’ (‘steel/iron’) and ‘Bad’ (‘bath’) and subsequently acquired a figurative usage associated with the idea of physical toughening and resilience.”
7. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores, 2014), p. 182. [Note: page reference corresponds to the Brazilian Portuguese edition cited by the author.]
8. A video that superimposes images from Doom with passages from the science fiction novel Diaspora by Greg Egan. The recordings of Doom: House of Hope, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, are part of a durational performance of approximately three hours, presented at the Park Avenue Armory in 2025. Between ballet, dance, performance, and skateboarding, claims for trans and queer rights, what stands out is a pseudo-activism of a theatricalising, sonic, atmospheric, and immersive bent, with much telegenic and hipster styling in the service of the society of the spectacle, as Guy Debord so lucidly articulated.
9. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, op. cit., p. 172. [Note: page reference corresponds to the Brazilian Portuguese edition cited by the author.]
10. Walter Benjamin, A Modernidade. Obras Escolhidas de Walter Benjamin [Modernity: Selected Works of Walter Benjamin] (Lisbon: Assírio & Alvim, 2006), p. 35.
11. In Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Lisbon: Relógio D’Água, 2011), pp. 618–619.