The Coolest New Gallery Is Your Local Celine Store

Slimane has purchased or commissioned some 26 pieces of art for Celine stores—mostly sculptures—much of it by young or mid-career artists. Like a hipster Albert C. Barnes, he collects with little interest in the market. Slimane is doing the art-fair circuit and frequently visits galleries in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, refining his taste the way any other collector might. “That’s what makes his approach a little different than a more impersonal collaboration,” says Tuazon.

Oscar Tuazon’s Mobile Floor (2019) was commissioned by Slimane for Paris’s Grenelle outpost.

Slimane does not work with an art adviser, as many high-profile collectors do. Some of the artists are friends; others say they’ve never met him. Slimane is a self-serious guy, and on the surface the collection he’s building is filled with neo-brutalist stainless-steel-and-black-slag cubes. But if he can be inscrutable, his retail army sets the tone of the stores with a friendly mien that contrasts delightfully with that of cold front-of-gallery employees. At Celine, they stand ready to decode the art and get you into that sequined jacket. And the artists concur: “Contact is welcome,” Tuazon says of his piece. “It’s not fragile.” Try laying your hands on the art in a New York gallery.