Economy Prompts Chanel to Ground Touring Pavilion

Women’s Wear Daily reported today that Chanel canceled plans to send its Mobile Art exhibition to London, Moscow, and Paris. The Zaha Hadid-designed pop-up, which made its stateside appearance in New York this fall, was supposed to travel the globe through 2010.

"Considering the current economic crisis, we decided it was best to stop the project," a Chanel spokeswoman told WWD. "We will be concentrating on strategic growth investments."

This isn’t the first trouble the project has seen. Though Chanel positioned the exhibition as a showcase for contemporary artists and high fashion, many saw it as too commercial. New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff was one of them. “The pavilion sets out to drape an aura of refinement over a cynical marketing gimmick," he wrote back in October. "If devoting so much intellectual effort to such a dubious undertaking might have seemed indulgent a year ago, today it looks delusional."