There was a time when a person’s cultural bragging rights stemmed from counting off the number of classic masterpieces seen in museums around the world. The Mona Lisa at the Louvre, Velazquez’s Las Meninas at the Prado, the David at Galleria dell’Accademia, van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dropping these names spoke to a proclivity for cultivation, travel and enlightenment. Though an appreciation for and understanding of great art remains a higher pursuit, there’s a new way to experience the medium outside of established institutions, which might come as a surprise—because it’s through the lens of luxury retail. In today’s discourse, the classics are joined by the Damien Hirst at Tiffany & Co., the Yayoi Kusama at Ginza Six, the Jean-Michel Basquiat at The Row, and the Siobhán Hapaska at CASA LOEWE.

The luxury retail environment has evolved to extend beyond the expected to incorporate fine art in gallery-inspired shopping spaces that act as a bridge between art and commerce. Spaces are outfitted with thoughtfully framed pieces, meaningful curation of objets d’art, artist-designed fitting rooms, and even layered lighting and plaster walls. Summed up, it’s a curated narrative that speaks to an immersive experience. Although this isn’t a new development—see Fondazione Prada, first established in 1993 to support contemporary art exhibits and cultural events—its current inspirations hint at modern motivations.

“With price hikes, luxury brands have to offer their customers something more than just products, and their exclusive store experience and connection with art is one way of doing it,” says Ana Andjelic, a New York–based global brand executive and author of Hitmakers: How Brands Influence Culture. “The more a brand is linked to craftsmanship and artistry, the more justified the high pricing is.”

The cultural cachet that comes with the viewing of a masterpiece while casually shopping a rack of clothing (in fairness, often the clothes themselves are masterpieces) is the kind of marketing no celeb-fronted campaign could ever achieve. Knowing, for example, that a trip to the Victoria Beckham Mayfair boutique to explore her latest collection this past winter also came with an up-close and personal look at Yoshitomo Nara’s Cosmic Eyes (in the Milky Lake) is the kind of draw that courts more than your average fashionphile—this is a customer who’s curating their closet as much as the rest of their home. The contemporary works, which hung in the boutique in February 2025, represented Beckham’s most recent partnership with Sotheby’s, wherein artworks are displayed in-store ahead of a scheduled auction in a promotional push. Previous collaborations between the two brands included showings of old masters like Peter Paul Rubens, and a female-centric exhibit in Beckham’s Dover Street store, which included works by Artemisia Gentileschi and Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun.

“Luxury has always been about staging a world view. At retail, this means more than just merchandising product, and instead offering proof of perspective,” says Nikita Walia, strategy director of New York–based branding and venture studio U.N.N.A.M.E.D. “Spatial design telegraphs brand values for consumers to connect to: taste, scarcity, cultural literacy.”

Two Crafts Beat as One

Whether this is a move that’s embraced by the art world at large is up for debate. In a Frieze magazine opinion piece titled “Why Fashion Has Entered the Business of Art Institutions,” writer Jeppe Ugelvig suggests the benefits of the fashion-art partnership are one-sided. He argues that fashion is seeking legitimacy by attempting to co-opt art’s “myth of refinement and the eternal” and translating it into mere marketing. In the end, fashion gains validity while art is diluted.

“It remains seen by many artists as a ‘lesser’ opportunity to present a new video artwork in an exhibition space located on the top floor of a luxury handbag boutique in Venice, even if said boutique funded said artwork and did so generously,” he writes. Though there’s undoubtedly a transactional element at play, it’s disingenuous to suggest that art or the artists who create it would suffer for it. Transaction is at the heart of survival as an artist—regardless of craft or medium. In fact, there’s a more equitable way of looking at this development, says Sonika Phakey, a London-based social, influencer and culture strategist.

“The relationship is symbiotic: the fashion world benefits from art’s pure creativity, while art gains visibility and scale through fashion’s platforms like retail spaces,” she says. “Both fields navigate a similar tension between creativity and commerciality, making them perhaps more alike than many realize.”

The strategy also exposes both parties to the audience they need: high-net-worth individuals (HNWI). The ongoing post-Covid luxury slowdown is fuelling concerns at even the biggest fashion conglomerates—Gucci-owner Kering posted a 14 per cent drop in revenue for the first quarter of 2025, while LVMH fell four per cent in the first half—which makes courting the right customer more vital than ever. But the success of these endeavours relies, as always, in upholding authenticity. It’s one thing to hang a priceless painting in a store, it’s another more nuanced undertaking to create a narrative that connects the clothing to the art.

When British fashion label Galvan hosted its first Paris Fashion Week presentation for fall/winter 2024, this connection was paramount. In addition to a fashion show, there was an AI-generated video screening by artist duo Hedda Roman and a classical dance performance, all held at La Cité art gallery in Paris’s second arrondissement. “A collaboration is meaningful when it is not just superficial, but tackles the themes first raised by artists,” Galvan CEO Cecilia Morelli said to Vogue Business. “When [creative director Anna-Christin Haas] was inspired by Hedda Roman, it wasn’t just about the forms and colours, but about the very questions raised by the artists around AI and the loss of human touch, which fashion also needs to address.”

Quest for Community

Historically, we’ve seen a connection between brand and art by way of collaborations: Louis Vuitton x Murakami, Versace x Andy Dixon, Alexander McQueen x Damien Hirst. But today’s boutiques-cum-galleries are reaching for another holy grail. It transcends commerce or commentary and instead leans into that other C-word that’s so sought after in the modern brand landscape: community. Whether it’s tapping into a local community via a theme that’s unique to its culture or taking a more global approach, creating a space in which people can feel as though they’re among like-minded individuals while also having a voice is gold.

“We believe wholeheartedly that visiting [our stores] is more than just a shopping experience,” says Allan Tse, vice-president of experience design and construction at Holt Renfrew in Toronto. “It’s also about connections with the arts. And the fact that we have these moments makes it an opportunity for people to explore, spend time and understand what we’re doing. It’s a multidisciplinary experience.”

In recent years, the company has leaned harder into art collaborations on multiple fronts, from in-store murals and installations by Canadian artists like Song Dahae and Liz Pead, to the launch of ON 3, the third-floor retail space at the Bloor Street flagship that blends fashion with exhibitions, pop-ups, performances and panel discussions.

“Fashion does not exist in its own vacuum,” Tse says. “It’s a cross-disciplinary thing, and whether it’s including musicians in our events or visual artists in our stores, we’re creating space for an intersection amongst all those various disciplines and media.”

Immersion in the space itself is enough to create a sense of community. Tse points to the flagship’s The Studio lounge, a magenta-accented area where the lighting is so flattering that customers can’t help but take selfies that they share on their socials. The same goes for The Webster’s fashion-meets-art-meets-culture ethos that runs in unique ways throughout its outposts across United States and Canada. Whether it’s the Gaetano Pesce–designed wardrobe installations in the New York Soho location, the pink polar bear sculpture by Paola Pivi in Toronto or the Dennis Hopper photographs at the South Beach flagship mounted during Art Basel, the spaces are designed to invite exploration, discovery, conversation and diffusion. These are gathering spots for customers to commune.

“These stores are not functioning just as stores,” Walia explains. “Brands are increasingly using these spaces for gatherings, performances, photos. If the space can reflect the right references, bring people together in a real way, then perhaps people can feel like they belong to an idea and not a brand.”

The Value of Attention

The fashion-art immersive experience also connects to the attention economy, a marketing strategy that’s designed to capture the attention of an increasingly time-strapped customer by fuelling engagement to maintain profitability. In the case of these highly curated retail experiences, however, the attention economy also works to make the customer a central figure.

In a 2024 study published by the Oxford Academic in the journal Interacting with Computers, researchers concluded that spending attention equals attracting attention, therefore “those ‘in the know’ are moved into the spotlight, become opinion-leaders, and eventually gain agenda-setting power.” In essence, the community becomes an ambassador for the brand.

Where brands and their stores are winning today is in capturing the attention of the customer by welcoming them into a space that speaks to them on multiple cultural levels. On-the-street brand recognition and logos are no longer enough; those highly desirable HNWI want cultural currency too.

“What’s changed is the kind of status people want to project. It’s not about money alone. It’s about cultural fluency: being early, knowing the reference, understanding the craft,” Walia says. “These retail environments let brands showcase that kind of depth, and let customers participate in it.”

Phakey points to Loewe as being especially skilled in this. By embracing the concept of “craft,” Jonathan Anderson transformed the dormant brand into a platform for artistic craftsmanship and, by extension, increased its perceived quality, she says.

Offline Begets Online

The immersive curation offered in these spaces could point to an obvious underlying ulterior motive—to get people in-store and keep them there as long as possible. (These are businesses, after all.) But don’t conflate this with a rejection of the online experience.

“Online and offline are one. Whatever starts offline ends up online and vice versa,” Andjelic says. “It’s always good to have something physical that’s not just ephemeral,” she adds, pointing to items like Chanel’s newly launched Arts & Culture Magazine, a print publication that highlights the luxury brand’s collaborations with global artists and cultural institutions. Its value is in the status it provides when displayed in a person’s home and is invisible to the algorithm. “But digital is also an important component of our lives,” Andjelic states.

Although there may have been a time when the Tiffany & Co. customer was decidedly unplugged, the brand’s current push to enter the cultural sphere of a younger demographic means it needs to strike a balance between social relevancy and the can’t-miss in-person experience. Cue its newfound focus on contemporary art. Through partnerships with the likes of Damien Hirst, the luxury jewellery brand has commissioned works that are displayed in its stores around the world—including Tiffany Incredible, which hangs in Toronto’s dazzlingly redesigned Yorkdale location, and a stunning exterior cherry blossom motif that covers the Ginza flagship in Tokyo. The works draw out the customer while the cultural cachet they provide inevitably drives them online to populate the feed.

“This is about re-legitimizing value through cultural adjacency. Art gives brands borrowed depth; it lends the illusion of permanence of meaning,” Walia says. “The bar for IRL is high, but when brands clear it, foot traffic becomes less about conversion and more about cultural permanence and aspiration.”