A Fashion Guide to Miami Art Week

The annual South Florida consortium — or bacchanal, depending on your point of view — known as Miami Art Week unofficially kicks off on Monday (officially, it gravitates around its headline event, Art Basel Miami Beach, which opens on Dec. 7).

Along with the art fairs (more than 20 are planned), including Design Miami, NADA and Untitled, related panels and innumerable soirees will bring hordes of Marni-clad gallery owners, Christian Louboutin-heeled collectors and Cartier-decked party people to the neon city.

But the fashion is not all on their backs. Indeed, the style set seems to have a bigger and bigger presence in the art world every year, and 2017 will see a host of different brands seeking new ways to access the ready-made audience and further the connection between the catwalk and the connoisseur. Following, a guide to what to see and where.

Cos

The London-based arty-minimalist label Cos has commissioned a British outfit called Studio Swine (a.k.a., “Super Wide Interdisciplinary New Explorers,” run by Azusa Murakami and Alexander Groves) for an updated version of a work called “New Spring,” to be shown as a satellite proxy of the furniture and design fair Design Miami. The original piece, which debuted at 2017’s Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan, features a willow-tree-like structure that emits vapor-filled elasticized bubbles.

Miami’s iteration will be much larger than what was seen in Italy. “The starting point was to research Milan as a city, looking in particular at its chandeliers,” said Karin Gustafsson, Cos’s creative director. “That led to springtime, and thinking about Japanese flowers.” Cos will host a pop-up shop at the installation.

Fendi has been collaborating with Design Miami for a decade. To celebrate the 10th year, the house selected Chiara Andreatti, a Venetian designer with bio-industrial aesthetics, to create an installation for the fair, called “Welcome!” It is, ostensibly, a living room, containing everything from an interwoven bamboo tabletop inspired by an Astuccio fur coat from 1971 to watercolor illustrations of previous Fendi editions at the event.

In a phone interview from Rome, Silvia Venturini Fendi, the label’s creative director of accessories, men’s wear and children’s wear, said: “I like how Chiara is able to mix primitive materials with very luxurious ones. This is really similar to what we do at Fendi, from the fur, which is the most primitive, the first garment of human beings, through the organic to the sexy.” Worth mentioning: Fendi was among the first fashion labels to design housewares when it started Fendi Casa, in 1987. Many have followed suit.

At the Spanish label Loewe’s Design District store, the creative director Jonathan Anderson and the company’s philanthropic branch, the Loewe Foundation, will unveil an exhibition called “Chance Encounters III.” This year, Mr. Anderson has chosen the Irish ceramist Sara Flynn, the late artist Richard Smith, of the United Kingdom, and Lionel Wendt, of Sri Lanka.

Each piece featured, in some way, captures Mr. Anderson’s fascination with irregularity in form and standard. Many of Ms. Flynn’s works are specially commissioned — they’re molten in line, and present dappled indentations as they narrow. “Between ceramics and fashion, there are of course the age-old terms that are employed to describe vessels: hips, neck, feet, bellies,” Ms. Flynn said “It is an obvious link.” Mr. Anderson emphasizes the gallery-like intent of the project: “It’s really not about the Loewe product. During the fair, we transform the store into a creative space, and leave the product in the background. It’s a way to promote these artists.”

A Miami Beach fashion haunt owned by Erika and Roma Cohen, Alchemist is featuring one-off products created in collaboration with such digitally buzzy names as Awol Erizku — the Ethiopian-born, Bronx-raised man responsible for art directing Beyoncé’s pregnancy reveal on Instagram — and Warren Lotas, who has developed an Instagram following for his eye-catching customizations (like converting Nike’s swoosh logo into a skull in profile).

Mr. Lotas’s contribution? A tattoo-inspired jacket application featuring a mermaid slow dancing with a skeleton. “I’m a designer slash artist for the Everyman,” he said. “I will do everything in my power to manifest my sense of humor into my work.”

Sies Marjan, a ready-to-wear label founded nearly two years ago, and run by the Dutch designer Sander Lak, recently teamed with the writer and artist Walter Robinson on a coloring book for RxArt, a nonprofit that helps children heal through visual arts programs. Mr. Robinson has created a work that will be on display at the Webster, a high-fashion multibrand boutique on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach.

He used a 96-by-66-inch cotton bedsheet, painting faces of models based on photographs taken at a Sies Marjan fashion show. “I saw that I could work with their portraits rather than the pulp imagery I had been using,” Mr. Robinson said. “I tried to give them a range of exotic hues that would suggest Sander’s inventive sense of color.” Mr. Lak has received critical acclaim for his use of ebullient, near-sugary hues in his collections.

Gucci continues its partnership with the artist and photographer Coco Capitán, revealing a new installment of its “Art Wall” initiative (previous examples have appeared in Milan and New York), which depicts Ms. Capitán’s shaky, naïve handwriting in billboard style. The Miami facade reads: “I Want to Go Back to Beliving A Story.” (Note that “Beliving” is purposefully misspelled.) Product featuring the phrase will be on sale from Dec. 1, when Gucci opens its Design District store.

Christian Dior began selling its “Dior Lady Art 2” capsule on Dec. 1. For the project, 10 contemporary artists customized the house’s signature Lady Bag. In this second edition, John Giorno’s version spells out “You Got to Burn to Shine”; Friedrich Kunath’s contribution shows two pre-kiss visages with a setting sun between their lips.

The watchmaker Audemars Piguet has commissioned the multidisciplinary artist Lars Jan for a large installation called “Slow-Moving Luminaries,” comprising a space marked with gridded features through which visitors may move. “My last two projects were, in a way, exploring the patterns of our lives in relation to various time scales,” said Mr. Jan (fittingly, given the initiative’s association with timekeeping). “From the everyday to the generational to the geological. This piece is a natural extension of these strains of inquiry.”

From Dec. 7, Hermès will sell blankets made in partnership with the South Korean artist Seulgi Lee. Made in editions of 12, the geometric drawings depicted on the throws recall regional fables, like “Le tigre fumant la pipe,” which is a linguistic transmutation of the Korean saying for “Once upon a time.”

The Museum of Ice Cream — the hugely popular, “imagination provoking” art-slash-Instagram-ready arcade featuring all things confectionery, with existing outposts in San Francisco and Los Angeles — will introduce its newest edition during Miami Art Week. A jewelry collaboration with the Miami-based label Miansai will come with it.

At Design Miami, Louis Vuitton will showcase the latest pieces from its Objets Nomades collection, which is a collection of limited-edition collectible furniture and housewares inspired by travel. A highlight here is a new “Bomboca” sofa by the Brazilian-born Campana brothers. The lumpen, puffy settee comes in varying cyan shades.

“The blue is a portrait of the light of Miami,” Humberto Campana said. “A picture of celestial, tropical luminosity, reflected by the deepness of the ocean.” “Bomboca” is a type of candy served at celebrations in Brazil; Mr. Campana said this sofa is a “souvenir” from his childhood memories.

The Fondazione Prada, the Milan-based arts institution founded by Miuccia Prada and others over 20 years ago, is set to reveal a three-night-only collaboration with the conceptual artist Carsten Höller on Dec. 5. Mr. Höller, Belgium-born and based in Sweden and Ghana, plumbs the antipodal reaches of human experience, and the conflicting feelings that come with it.

The work, called “The Prada Double Club Miami,” is essentially a live-act temporary dance hall of two opposed spatial designs: one gray and colorless, one combatively hued. The effect is intended to confound and challenge (and enlighten) the visitor. Prada and Mr. Höller have tried this before in London, circa 2008. There, however, it stayed open for eight months.

By invitation only. 59 Northwest 49th Street, Miami

Correction: December 1, 2017
An earlier version of this article misstated the duration of Fondazione Prada's exhibit with the conceptual artist Carsten Höller. The exhibit is on view for three nights, not two.

ORIGINAL SOURCE