LVMH's rich-people Epcots are bad, actually
Plus: Inside the energy-drink arms race!
We talk all the time about the various ways the titans of the global booze business influence American culture, civics, and politics. I’d go so far to say it’s a pillar of Fingers’ editorial mandate, in fact. But rarely does The Discourse smile upon us with such an explicit example of this paradigm as it has today, reader. Because today, we’re going to talk about the world’s richest man, the world’s highest-end liquor conglomerate, and the neighborhoods they’re building from whole cloth in global cities increasingly racked by inequality.
“It all makes sense when you say we’re urban planners,” LVMH’s head of fashion promised the Wall Street Journal last week for a slick, soft-focus feature on the multinational firm’s sprawling real-estate empire and skyscraping ambitions. “Good urban planning is taking all aspects of life and lifestyle and bringing them together in one place.”
If you, like me, are baffled as to why LVMH—whose luxury fashion portfolio parallels a dozens-deep stable of pricey drinks brands1 like Dom Pérignon, Ardbeg, and Château d'Yquem—is pushing its agenda into the traditionally public sector of “creating” cities, you’re not alone. It does not, in fact, all make sense on first glance. Luckily, we’ve got one of the sharpest architectural critics of the era to help us parse the consumptive rot lurking just beneath the glittering veneers and soaring rhetoric of privatized urban planning.
“It’s basically just an amusement park for buying shit,” Kate Wagner, the architecture critic at The Nation and the longtime writer of the popular blog McMansion Hell, told Fingers by phone earlier this week. “Maybe ‘deranged’ is too much of an ‘internet word’ to use… I think it’s uncomfortable.”