LOUIS VUITTON & KANYE WEST: WOW
LOUIS VUITTON & KANYE WEST: WOW
Last night, I attended Kanye West’s birthday party at the Louis Vuitton flagship store on the corner of 57th Street & 5th Avenue and was really one of those 2 or 3 times a year I attend an event and say as a marketer “Wow.” (The last one I can recall, other than our own Sundance events, was the Nike Air Force One Party last year I blogged about. – I attend literally hundreds of events a year.)
Thousands of people standing around outside watching and waiting, paparazzi everywhere. The room everywhere you turned you were bumping into a celebrity – Jay Z, Sean Combs’, Jermaine Dupri, Mariah Carey – A List celebrities who are trendsetters.
The amazing thing for me was the audience – A high-brow luxury store celebrating a rapper in a room filled with today’s urban youth – Filled with the who’s who of trend setting brands, and predominately minorities on the corner on 57th Street & 5th Avenue, the party was a few hundred attendees, tightly packed, with the Louis Vuitton brand present, but not too over produced. For a brand that a decade ago would have seen itself as a strictly “white” entity, last night showcased the flexibility and vitality of one of the world’s biggest brands. It’s clearly a new world and a new America – This couldn’t, and wouldn’t have happened even 5 years ago for a luxury brand. While some would see a disconnect between the audience and the brand, for those of us in the marketing and branding businesses last night was a celebration of where American pop culture has moved over the last decade.
Louis Vuitton didn’t intend to necessarily be embraced by this audience but it has happened and for a high brow European brand to not only accept but celebrate its crossover appeal is significant. Clearly Louis Vuitton is a brand which is in complete contrast to Cristal who made the idiotic comments about not wanting rappers drinking their product (You would have been better off ignoring rather than offending?).
Last night was really an event which reinforced my belief that urban culture and youth culture are one and the same (watch MTV – How much rock & roll do you see? – Walk in Times Square – What do the ads look like?)
Hats off to Louis Vuitton for celebrating diversity and recognizing that the world has changed…. It’s a new world and people spend, behave and act different than they ever have. Really as a brand today for a relatively minimal cost (in-store event) they have thousands of trend setters buzzing, and I am sure the event will get great press in the media for days and weeks to come.
Tags: 5W Public Relations, 5WPR, 5WPR CEO, Crisis PR, PR AGENCY, PR Firm, Pubilc Relations, Ronn Torossian
