Twentysix Luxury Brands

Twentysix Luxury Brands is a photographic zine by MarieVic, shot in New York City during election week 2020 as the country's high-end shopping districts boarded up their storefronts in anticipation of post-election unrest. Plywood window coverings blanket the strip whose extroverted glassed windows are normally meant to speak a language of enticement instead, the brands appear behind raw plywood, unbranded for a week, identifiable only by location and embossed nameplates. The book takes its title and structure from Ed Ruscha's 1963 artist book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, the foundational gesture of conceptual photobook practice that traded fine-art subjects for the deadpan repetition of the American landscape. MarieVic joins a long lineage of Ruscha homages—Mishka Henner's Eighteen Swimming Pools, Jeff Brouws's Twenty-four Former Filling Stations, and others—that adopt the "number-subject-location" formula and Ruscha's clinical typography to address consumerism, urban decay, and the passage of time. Here the formula meets a specific moment in 2020 New York, in which the architecture of luxury was briefly and bluntly remade as defensive infrastructure.