A Gallery of This Age
That night, I called Jo Sudeok in and had him look over the pictures worked into the building.
“What do you think?”
“If it were me, I believe I'd try to save them.”
“Right?”
“Yes. And since we're at it, we ought to set the interior so it answers the murals.”
If a young man was painted on the outside of a shop, caught mid-throw with a bouquet, then inside you would stand a mannequin with both arms flung wide, waiting to receive the flowers. The idea was to strike a run of witty notions, until the pictures and the interior called back and forth.
“Do you think you can?”
“What? I... me?”
“Who else would?”
“Ordinarily a specialist firm would...”
“And we have someone right here who's better than any firm.”
“Ha ha. A generous appraisal from the Director, as always... it does put the strength in a man, I must say...”
“Then give it everything. I'm counting on you.”
“Yes, yes. Just leave it to me. Ha ha.”
“Would a week or so be enough?”
“...?”
“There's the interior construction schedule to consider.”
“M-more than enough. With Mad Bull beside me, a day comes out to about forty hours. Heh heh heh.”
He could talk that way all he liked; the specialists would be put on the job for as long as he wanted them. At any rate, if Jo Sudeok was taking the artistic side, there would be nothing left to doubt.
For a while, then, all I have to do is pour myself into the publicity.
Meanwhile, on Park Yonghak's first day back at Hyeon-gang after a long trip away, he summoned every last one of the company presidents.
What subject would he fling at them this time? Tension was only just beginning to draw tight across the executives' faces.
“You eat before you came?”
He hadn't aimed the question at any one of them.
“...”
They were all still shifting where they stood, unable to answer, when he went on.
“I called you in early. You think it's all right to show up without eating?”
The chairman glanced back, and his secretary gave a signal. A moment later several employees came in carrying large boxes.
“We do this work so everybody can eat and live. So eat, first.”
A meal, in the middle of a meeting. Not once since the founding had such a thing been done. Even so, the mood didn't seem bad, and the presidents let themselves look cautiously relieved. They waited, figuring he would at least give them something simple to eat. Sushi, perhaps.
Oh?
What the employee held out was bread, sealed in a clear bag. A Hornbun soboro bun, all peanut streusel. A cheesecake shaped like a capsule. A chocolate roll of the Rocket Friends. A rather darling little meal for executives staring down sixty.
Darling or not, it made no difference to him.
“You know this bread's so scarce these days a man can't even get it, don't you?”
The look on their faces said it plain enough: so this was what it meant to be a Hyeon-gang executive. You got to slam down three or four pieces of Capsulemon Bread before the morning was old.
And then, at last, even Mad Bull, set out in case a throat closed up.
“Dragged out early, you're tired, eh? Drink. Then we start.”
A tab clicked. Glug, glug.
“Eat, and listen.”
At that single sentence the presidents took up the bread, one and then another.
“You half kill yourselves making a product, and for what? Can't even advertise the thing right, and it keels over before you ever sell it.”
“...”
“Now look at this bread. How about it? Putting a sticker in the thing. What's so grand about that? But!”
All at once his voice climbed.
“Yes, sir.”
“So how should the marketing go? It's got to be tied up with collecting, hasn't it?”
In plain words, the bread's whole way of selling had been built around the collecting of stickers.
“Some empty-headed fellow says, put a sticker in and it sells, so let's try something like that. Talked a heap of ignorant nonsense, they did. We don't have people like that at Hyeon-gang, do we?”
A thin, dry swallow.
The presidents, as if they had rehearsed it, could do nothing but force the dryness down.
“Don't go chasing first place just to chase it. I'm telling you to work out why those rascals climbed up there.”
“...”
“Copy the finished thing, and that's plagiarism. Copy the way of thinking, and that is benchmarking.”
The chairman's bellowing did not stop there.
“...?”
“Lean on the winning formulas we've piled up till now, and you will never make bread like this. Not if you die and wake again.”
He meant for them to go back and inspect the structure of their thinking itself.
“Change everything except your wife, your children, and your grandchildren. You hear me?”
At Park Yonghak's shout, the presidents bowed their heads as one.
Henri Vuitton was watching Park Jihoon's solo interview on the BBC.
He was not, as a rule, a man who put his face on television. And yet he had accepted the BBC. Oxford Street's reopening was nearly at the door; it had to be for the publicity. The strange part was that he answered the reporter's questions in Korean.
Put another way, a luxury shop was no different from an art museum of our time. When the interpretation ended, Park Jihoon went on.
At the host's words, Park Jihoon asked with a pleased smile.
Park Jihoon smiled once more, bright and easy.
Wrap a thing up tight and let a fantasy grow around it, and a twisted desire is what people come away with in the end. Then they start dividing rank by whether or not you own the luxury good, and judging the person by that alone. That was precisely the point Park Jihoon meant to guard against.
The interview wrapped up around there.
The popularization of luxury.
Here, too, Park Jihoon was pressing the very same argument.
“Hm.”
Henri Vuitton lifted the receiver at once.
“Would you put me through to Mr. Luke Jacobs?”
Luy Vuitton's Three-Second Bag was selling at a tremendous clip.
It was by no means cheap. But because it was made of synthetic leather, it wasn't a price that put the thing beyond all reach. In Asia, where luxury was still an unfamiliar country, you might have called it the perfect item to enter on. Thanks to that, Japan—sitting in the very middle of a bubble—had caught a Luy Vuitton fever that had no business arriving when it did.
Perhaps that was why. Even when the week's sales were reported to him, Luke could hardly make himself believe the figures.
“...”
So he put himself on a plane for Tokyo at once. He had the feeling it wouldn't be real until he saw it with his own two eyes.
Back when he had brought the design draft, the exchange had been a short one, and Park Jihoon had only nodded, cool as anything.
Luke — “If we go ahead... like this?”
Jihoon — “Of course.”
Luke — “With nothing revised?”
Jihoon — “Yes. This is enough.”
He had said the factories would run twenty-four hours a day, and then he had never once interfered. Not a change this, not a change that. An investor who put up the money and kept his hands to himself. It was the situation every designer dreamed of, and yet, now that it was real, Luke was honestly uneasy.
Is this... really all right?
And then, wouldn't you know it. The moment he stepped off at the airport, he understood exactly why Park Jihoon had worn that confident face.
All along the corridor toward the duty-free shops, Luy Vuitton advertisements were posted, and in every one of them the model's hand held a monogram bag. The hall was packed. At the Luy Vuitton shop in the center of the duty-free floor, a line had formed that was nothing short of enormous. Strangely enough the line drained quickly, and just as quickly filled again. Everyone who came out carried a shopping bag of the same size, as if they were all buying the same thing. And gratefully—as if they had promised it to one another—every one of them wore a happy smile.
The streets of Tokyo were even more astonishing. Most of the middle-aged women walking them carried a Luy Vuitton bag. Stand on a corner for an hour, and you could look your fill at the bags Luke had made.
“Ha!”
So the talk of running the factory around the clock had been the truth. All the way back to the hotel, Luke went in a daze. He phoned headquarters to ask how the day's sales were doing, and an answer he hadn't looked for came back.
Operator: “The chairman wishes to speak with you.”
Operator: “I'll connect you at once.”
A moment later, a familiar voice came on.
“This is Henri Vuitton. I have a proposal to make, so I was waiting for your call.”
A proposal. Sales were so good that they meant to give him a seat somewhere. Something of that sort.
“An amusing idea occurred to me. I wondered if you might be the one to realize it.”
Luke: “...?”
“What if a Capsulemon character went onto our bags?”
Luke: “Sorry?”
At first Luke doubted his own ears.
“It doesn't have to sell. If young students come into our shop, look, and can laugh, that will be quite enough.”
If that was all he wanted, then making the thing would not be especially difficult.
“Would that really be all right?”
“I see you haven't heard.”
Luke: “...?”
“From now on, a luxury shop will be the art museum of our age.”
The next day, I had a call from Henri Vuitton early in the morning. He wanted to know whether I could spare him a little time.
“I'll come to London.”
He meant to come himself. What reason did I have to wave him off? And so that evening the two of us sat down to dinner together, at a restaurant in Britain.
“Thanks to you, Director Park, the share price has doubled.”
“If I'd known it would go like this, I would have bought a few shares.”
At the joke, Henri Vuitton smiled with real pleasure. It was the easy, generous laugh of a man who had been beautifully educated. He had a gift for leaving the person across from him feeling pleased.
“Thanks to that, I have the overwhelming support of the shareholders, and I'm to lead Luy Vuitton again. It is all thanks to you, Director Park.”
“What a shame. On a day this good, and you have to drink the toast alone.”
“Surely you could take a sip with me, just for my sake?”
“I'm sorry. I want the first drink of my life to be with my grandfather.”
“Your grandfather will be very pleased, I imagine.”
Henri Vuitton took a contented mouthful of wine before he went on.
“As was only right, the full board agreed as one, and a new issue of shares was resolved. As early as this week, you become one of us at Luy Vuitton.”
I grinned.
“Then from the next board meeting, I suppose I'll have to sit in as well.”
“Of course.”
It was the happiest smile Henri Vuitton had shown all day.
“In name, I hold the chairmanship. But I intend to take up your philosophy of management with all my heart, Director Park.”
It wasn't something said for politeness. There was real sincerity in it. That was the only way to put it.
“Which is why I say this...”
But that he was sincere to this extent, I hadn't begun to imagine.
“What would you say to releasing a Capsulemon collaboration from our Luy Vuitton?”
“I... beg your pardon?”
“I looked into it, and there is this thing called evolution. If we engraved the first, second, and third stages, in that order, upon a wallet, a handbag, and a suitcase... wouldn't that be amusing?”
There was, yes, a record of a certain luxury house in the 2020s selling clean through on a similar concept. But the nerve of it, to try the thing in this era.
The more I look at him, the better I like him.
And so I answered, in high spirits.
“Ah, why not. Let's do it.”