BALENCIAGA Takeover at Colette with YNGVE HOLEN

Balenciaga is taking over the first floor of the colette store in Paris from June 19th to August 5th, 2017.

How do you distribute luxury fairly?

Artist Yngve Holen seems to propose an answer to this question with the piece CAKE, which will be exhibited in colette as part of Balenciaga’s takeover. CAKE was chosen from the artist’s oeuvre by Demna Gvasalia, Balenciaga’s artistic director, and consists of a Porsche Panamera cut into four pieces. Holen’s dissection of the nuclear family’s ultimate object of desire is displayed as four equal shares and serves as a nod to Marie Antoinette’s order, “Let them eat cake.” The object, rendered inoperable, sits with its open engine, split leather seats, and cleaved windows, like a foreign specimen being researched in a lab.

Furthermore, a special “car interior” scent was developed for the event to be diffused throughout the space and a simulated foreign shopping experience is created by broadcasting videos of street activity in cities like New York, London, and Berlin.