on November 04, 2025
A few weeks ago on 19 October, news broke about the Louvre heist. A crime so cartoonish that it’s funny to think it actually happened in 2025: a group of thieves climbed the side of the Louvre, cut into a gallery, and disappeared. Eight pieces of France’s crown jewels were stolen in broad daylight, studded with emeralds and diamonds worth nearly €90 million. Naturally this incident grabbed the same type of attention a film promo or a fashion campaign gets because it involved beautiful objects and high stakes. But why do we care? Fashion, art, and crime have long centered one thing: the power of the image.
The Power of The Image
What something looks like and what it makes one feel, often matters more than what it actually is. And lately, that tension between being seen, owned or taken feels like the pulse of the moment. They didn’t just steal jewels. They stole the image of power and status, and a legacy that was symbolized by those objects. Fashion, after all, traffic in feel, in image and in the accumulation of value. What the heist highlights is how visibility can turn into vulnerability. Into this dynamic come the eyes of Margaret Keane and the children of Yoshitomo Nara. Both artists deal in the image, how it is looked at, by whom, and who controls it.
The Louvre Heist
The stolen jewels weren’t just valuable; they were symbols of status, designed to be looked at, displayed, adored. But once they were behind museum glass, they stopped being accessories and turned into relics. The heist flipped that back,made them wearable again, even if just in fantasy. Suddenly, they were alive in the public imagination. It’s ironic: the moment something disappears, it becomes more visible. The same logic drives fashion drops, hype cycles, and limited editions, scarcity creates mystique and obsession. Whether the Louvre thieves understood that or not, we’ll probably never know.
Margaret Keane: The Eyes That Got Stolen
If the Louvre heist is about physical theft, Margaret Keane’s story is about image theft. Her paintings of wide-eyed women and children were everywhere in the 1960s, prints, postcards, posters. But for years, the world thought her husband painted them. Keane’s faces are instantly recognizable: innocent, melancholic, almost alien. They’re made to be looked at, yet they carry the loneliness of being misseen. There’s something in those eyes that connects to our own digital fatigue,being constantly visible but rarely recognized for what’s real. Fashion does this too. It takes inspiration, rebrands it, resells it. Credit gets blurred. Keane’s story reminds us that authorship and image are often divorced, especially when a woman’s work becomes a product.
The Art Heist Scene
Before the recent wave of burglaries, history had already witnessed its share of art thefts. From the 1473 pirate seizure of Hans Memling’s The Last Judgment en route to Florence, to the legendary 1911 disappearance of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre at the hands of Vincenzo Peruggia, a disgruntled former employee who ultimately served just six months in prison.
But the Massachusetts robbery marked a clear turning point , a moment when art theft evolved from isolated incidents into a calculated industry. As art historian Tom Flynn notes, the rise in heists during the 1970s “coincides with the boom of the art market.” The decade’s shifting cultural values, he argues, were reflected in the debut and widespread popularity of Antiques Roadshow in 1977, a sign of a world beginning to see art not only as cultural heritage, but as currency.
At the same time, criminals were quick to recognize the vulnerability of museums struggling with shrinking budgets and lax security. Press reports from the early 1970s spoke of “funding crises” and staff cutbacks, leaving priceless works dangerously exposed. The theft of Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from London’s National Gallery in 1961, followed by the loss of three Rembrandts from Dulwich Picture Gallery in 1966, underscored a sobering reality, that even masterpieces could be taken away with alarming ease.
In fashion, all three are in play at once. Every image, every campaign, every runway look negotiates who’s looking, who’s being looked at, and who controls the frame. Fashion thrives on attention but constantly risks exploitation,of ideas, of bodies, of culture. The line between homage and theft is razor-thin.
Final Thoughts
The Louvre heist isn’t just a true-crime headline,it’s a mirror for how we assign value. Keane’s story shows what happens when the image looks back. Together, they say something about our obsession with beauty, ownership, and rebellion. Maybe that’s what fashion’s really doing when it borrows from art: staging its own kind of heist. Stealing beauty from history, remixing it, and wearing it like it was always ours. Just make sure, this time, the eyes are open.
