Hong Kong art dealer and fashion icon Pearl Lam talks style, taste and luxury fashion
As Art Basel Hong Kong approaches, the renowned gallerist and local fashion icon shares her thoughts on the relationship between collecting art and buying expensive clothing
There are strong parallels between collecting art and consuming luxury fashion, says noted art dealer Pearl Lam – the famously colourful proprietor of eponymous galleries in Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai.
Overwhelmingly, newer buyers of luxury fashion are focused on bold-faced brands, Lam says. “Very few want emerging, young designers. If you can afford it, you want the big names. You want to feel confident, that is why you buy big labels … It’s much the same thing with art.”
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New collectors, says Lam, “want to be secure and they don’t want to make a mistake. So they often buy names that everyone knows, they will go for the security of bigger names – because if there is a strong market for it, if everybody talks about it, it must be good quality … They want household names.” Lam says – Andy Warhol, Pablo Picasso, Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst, et al. “It’s very similar with fashion. With Hermès, Dior, Chanel or Louis Vuitton, they know they can’t be wrong.”
In fashion, the more sophisticated the consumer becomes, the more willing they’ll be to detour from the mainstream and express their own personality. Similarly, Lam says collectors often evolve from simply buying works with a name they know and trust to patronising art they are truly passionate about.
“A lot of my collectors come to me because they trust me. After so many years being in this business, they trust in what we show and what we judge to be good,” Lam says. “We have a record of building emerging artists into ‘brand names’, we have that credibility already.” Collectors, she says, will “follow you because they’re confident that the artists you represent will one day become a brand name.”