Bernhard Willhelm is clocking a milestone: His label turns 20 this year, which puts him in a very elite group of independent niche designers. That’s no mean feat. He’s also recently decamped from Los Angeles back to Europe, and, last fall, he set up a temporary studio in Rosazza, a remote village in the Piedmont region of Italy, the better to be near the wool mills he wanted to work with. It’s also a spiritual place, located at the confluence of two rivers not far from the Sanctuary of Oropa, whose black Madonna draws 800,000 pilgrims a year.
During Willhelm’s mountain retreat, Salvator Mundi sold at auction for just north of $450 million and went to a new home at the Jean Nouvel–designed satellite of the Louvre in Abu Dhabi. That got the designer thinking (once again) about globalization, capitalism, religion, the commodification of art, and branding in general.
“The Mona Lisa has been merchandised for years. Fashion is about selling quantities; it is what you project on it,” the designer offered during a showroom visit. Cue rough-outs of the Mona Lisa in a dozen or so patches, the Salvator Mundi in jacquard and on triangle designs (mixed with the words “capital” or “clap”), and some outsize pills—antibiotics, presumably—to go with them. Even the late Liliane Bettencourt and a riff on a famous soda logo make an appearance. The Label Queen and Beverly Hills totes spoke for themselves. The strategically placed ears of corn, a little less so. The designer said something about cooking a lot of polenta in the mountains. It’s conceivable that sometimes an ear of corn might be just an ear of corn. But Willhelm being Willhelm, that’s altogether unlikely.
