LVMH: The World's Largest Fascist Design House
LVMH Group is the world's preeminent luxury goods conglomerate, with a diverse portfolio of over 70 brands including namesake Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi, and Givenchy.
LVMH has gone from strength to strength, almost doubling their market share of luxury goods from 12 to 22% between 2018-2023, becoming one of the 10 largest firms (by market value) in history. As put by an equity investment strategist, “this illustrates the rise of wealthy people across the world, of a polarised society, the luxury sector is therefore experiencing strong growth.” Indeed, the rich are engorging themselves on luxury consumption as a direct consequence of the massively increasing rate at which they expropriate the vast majority of society’s new wealth.
You might assume that with unparalleled dominance, and a swathe of nominally distinct brands, that LVMH Group would encompass an assortment of philosophical approaches to design. Recently, LVMH brands have formed the core of a broader critique of “high” design industries that is gaining popularity: through a process of market consolidation and trend-chasing, the aesthetics of design have hegemonised. Many have rightly noted how this phenomenon has sapped individual brands of their unique “brand identity”, greatly reducing the overall distinctiveness of goods on offer. But the less noted, yet most pernicious feature of this new “monoaesthetic” in design industries, is its strikingly fascistic nature.
Take for instance this RIMOWA speaker concept design, created by Devon Turnbull. Someone familiar with the heritage German luggage brand, which now operates under the LVMH banner, might simply see the "grooved" metal styling and recognise it as RIMOWA’s proprietary motif. Those unfamiliar could handwave the seemingly inconspicuous design as “minimalist” or generic. In fact, the speaker design appropriates hallmarks of industrial aesthetics with its neutral colour palette, militaristic look with sci-fi edge, and emphasis on a single industrial material (in this case, company aluminium). Correspondingly, the speaker’s imposing sharp angles and stark whiteness mimic architecture associated with fascist regimes.
Each of these features alone would not substantiate the speaker being categorised as “fascist design”. However, when one considers the totality of these elements, you would be remiss to ignore the connections or put it down to mere coincidence. Explicating further, the speaker’s raw metallic coldness is joyless. Its rendering purely as a branded motif that elevates its commodity form over any social context is jarring. Consider the sacred role of music in your own life, or how it operates society-wide as a universal and humanistic artform, best experienced in groups (perhaps due to its inherent collectivity). Is the anti-social aesthetic of Turnbull’s RIMOWA speaker what comes to mind? I doubt it.
That speaker would not be at home in a public space or a cosy home, welcoming to friends and guests. Rather, it symbolises exclusivity and elitism, an aloofness to its very use and the social meaning of music, purposefully designed to satiate the desire of the wealthy few to feel such detachment.
This brings us to the political reality that fascist design aestheticises and propagates. German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin identified fascist design as a key pillar of the fascist political project itself. Benjamin noted that establishing a fascist aesthetic was a core propaganda task for fascist regimes who, due to their anti-democratic nature, needed a substitute for delivering property and social rights to the masses. In place of addressing people’s real needs and demands, fascists enable their participation in “the production of ritual values”. Designs like the RIMOWA speaker represent what Benjamin calls
“the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art’, Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.”
To be sure, LVMH is no fascist regime cloaking an entire country. It is an international conglomerate that produces luxury goods for the would-be and actual fascists of the world – those who rely on anti-democratic totalitarianism, subtle and extreme, to maintain their fustian class position above society. It is only natural for such an institution to produce designs like the RIMOWA speaker, which embody nothing of the human experience of music, but rather its total negation. It is in this distinct opposition to sociality that the speaker finds not only its form, but the meaning which attracts the LVMH clientele and those who aspire to join them.
It is always compelling to explore the political dynamics of design – particularly so when considering something as seemingly non-descript as the RIMOWA speaker. But one does not need to look quite so deeply to discover how LVMH brands are creating fascist designs. Case in point: this all-black outfit, again from RIMOWA.
It took a split second for the STAR WARS nerd in me to recognise the barely concealed reproduction of the Imperial Officer uniform donned by George Lucas’s iconic space fascists. RIMOWA reproduces not only the uniform but the exact pose struck by a Stormtrooper officer from the film. Lucas of course modelled the “efficient, totalitarian, fascist” Imperial costumes on the real uniforms worn by Hitler and the Nazis.
RIMOWA – run by the son of LVMH CEO and richest man in the world, Bernard Arnault – is shamelessly embracing fascist aesthetics without so much as an attempt to hide or re-contextualise the politics it represents. This openness reinforces that LVMH has no fear that fascist imagery will alienate their customer base. Instead, they anticipate (and have almost certainly validated via rigorous sales and social media data analytics) that such aesthetics will appeal to those who live or crave exclusivity. This is design by people who host private JAY Z concerts for capitalist ministers, while millions of working class people struggle against those ministers’ authoritarian policies in the streets.
There are no perfect answers, but it is the responsibility of all who abhor fascism and love design to be sensitive to that which aestheticises those same far-right politics. We should be wise to the power of design to shape our social reality – would fascist regimes have invested so much into cultivating their aesthetics, had they no impact on the ensemble of social relations? Walter Benjamin posited that “Communism responds by politicising art”. In part, this article aims to demonstrate how exactly one could identify and criticise such art.
However, refuting the fascist aestheticisation of design can only be achieved by designers who design critically and politically. The prevalence of countervailing, pro-social design will almost always be determined by the strength of the social movements from which they spring. In our era of unprecedented dominance for the uppermost layers of the ruling class, depressing, right-wing design is flooding creative industries. The antidotal, radical design that we need to recolour our world will grow with the culture of resistance among the working class and oppressed.
Note: Thank you to my beautiful partner Chloe Gabrielle-Fuller for helping me workshop the Walter Benjamin component of this piece, and thanks again to the wonderful Reece Hooker for his sharp editing.
Note 2: Ahahaha
