Editor’s Note: This story is part of a new series on the convergence of art and luxury. See all of our reporting on the topic here.Look no further than the auction houses for proof that art and luxury are becoming increasingly intertwined. In 2025, Sotheby’s and Christie’s both softened the blow of sluggish art sales by doubling down on luxury. Handbags, jewels, watches, cars, you name it: these items now account for roughly a third of Sotheby’s total revenue, with private luxury sales soaring 350 percent year on year. Christie’s isn’t far behind, with luxury accounting for a quarter of its overall take.And it’s not just the auction game. Art fairs, too, stepped up their luxury collaborations in 2025. However, as this year’s jam-packed art fair circuit proved, luxury brands are no longer happy hovering on the sidelines as sponsors. They’re now fully embedded partners.At Frieze London, and across Art Basel’s global spread (Paris, Basel, and Miami Beach), luxury brands now support curated sections, mentorship initiatives, immersive installations, and large-scale commissions. Take Tiffany & Co.’s backing of Artist-to-Artist at Frieze, a mentorship-based initiative pairing established artists with emerging ones, or Ray-Ban being an official show partner at Art Basel Miami. The latter created the Ray-Ban Clubhouse, an immersive installation blending art, music, and style. But are these partnerships just sophisticated marketing strategies, or can they genuinely enrich the art fair ecosystem?According to Marc Spiegler, who was Art Basel’s global director for 15 years and who now works as a cultural strategy consigliere, the answer depends on how far brands are willing to decenter themselves. “Luxury brand partnerships can definitely make great projects—projects that wouldn’t have happened otherwise—happen,” he told ARTnews.Spiegler pointed to precedents that have become fixtures of the art world calendar. They include UBS’s longstanding sponsorship of Art Basel’s Unlimited sector, BMW’s Art Journey program, and the Chanel Culture Fund. “None of these projects have any direct link to sales,” he said, “and all of them have been marked by positioning the artists way ahead of the brand.”This artist-first, brand-second principle has become something of a litmus test over the last 12 months as art fairs navigated a crowded sponsorship landscape in a cautious market. Frieze London, which opened this year amid a dense calendar of brand-led activations across the city, was especially explicit about how it frames these relationships.“Frieze’s fashion partners are collaborators, not simply sponsors,” Emily Glazebrook, Frieze’s chief commercial officer, told ARTnews. “They are integrated into the fair through curated sections, lounges, or initiatives that are a core part of the fair’s identity.”She highlighted Stone Island’s support of Focus, Frieze’s section for younger galleries, and Tiffany & Co.’s backing of Artist-to-Artist. “These collaborations reflect Frieze’s commitment to fostering community and building partnerships that help strengthen visibility of artists,” Glazebrook added.Tiffany’s involvement in Artist-to-Artist, now in its third year, aligns with Spiegler’s thinking. The program emphasizes peer nomination, intergenerational dialogue, and solo presentations by emerging artists, with minimal branding on the floor. De Beers, which forged its first partnership with Frieze Masters this year, adopted a similarly hands-off approach, presenting a video installation tracing the geological and cultural history of natural diamonds. Framed as an exploration of deep time rather than a product showcase, the installation did its best not look out of place among the historical material that defines the Masters section.Other collaborations operated closer to the line between cultural production and brand-building in 2025. While Prada did not exactly team up with Frieze, the luxury brand’s “private traveling club,” Prada Mode, launched an art-and-luxury event that coincided with the London mega-fair. It was conceived with the artist duo Elmgreen & Dragset and continued a relationship stretching back to their 2005 Prada Marfa art installation in West Texas, a Prada boutique that doesn’t actually sell anything. This year’s Prada Mode was an immersive environment in which guests could watch movies, attend talks, and immerse themselves within The Audience, a cinema installation created by the artists. But the project was neither a retail opportunity nor a conventional exhibition. It was, instead, a hybrid space, one that could not exist without corporate backing, but whose meaning was not reducible to promotion. If Frieze London was a testing ground for these partnerships in 2025, Art Basel Paris was where they really came into their own. Now firmly installed at the glass-covered Grand Palais, the fair leans into the city’s dual identity as a global art capital and an epicenter of fashion and luxury. Brands are not merely adjacent to the fair but embedded within its public programming. (Noah Horowitz, Art Basel’s CEO, declined to comment for this article.)Among the most ambitious examples this year was 30 Blizzards, a large-scale exhibition by Turner Prize–winning artist Helen Marten. Officially a part of Art Basel Paris’s public programming, the piece was commissioned by Italian fashion house Miu Miu and staged during the fair at the Palais d’Iéna. Free to the public, the project unfolded as a five-channel installation activated at intervals by 30 performers, combining video, sculpture, music, and live performance.“The invitation was very broad and very generous, but explicitly [needed] to include a performative element,” Marten told the Art Newspaper. “It sort of defied all of the conventional gallery or museum invitations that I usually receive.”Elsewhere at Art Basel Paris, luxury partnerships took on a more overtly structural role. Miu Miu served as the official partner of the fair’s public program, while Louis Vuitton drew crowds with its Artycapucines handbags designed by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. “To be completely honest, doing such a presentation at an art fair, as an artist, is very nerve-wracking,” he told WWD, adding that two decades ago, he was criticized for incorporating the Vuitton monogram into some of his paintings. “People always wonder about whether art should be marketed so much commercially.”Audemars Piguet continued its long-running cultural engagement at the fair, and a scaled-down Art Basel Shop featured artist collaborations alongside luxury products. For Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s chief artistic officer and global director of fairs, the alignment reflected broader changes in contemporary practice. “Contemporary art is much more interdisciplinary today than what it used to be,” he told WWD. “That interdisciplinarity goes across fashion, design, moving image and music.”2025 showed that audience strategy is central to this convergence. “Our fairs take place in the world’s leading arts capitals,” Glazebrook told ARTnews, “and attract an international, culturally savvy crowd that is particularly appealing to luxury brands.”According to the Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting, younger collectors, especially women, are driving growth and tend to collect across categories, from art and design to jewelry, watches, and fashion. For brands, art fairs offer concentrated cultural access. And for art fairs, brand funding provides stability and reach. Still, the question of balance remains. Spiegler warned that the true measure of success lies in longevity and restraint. The most effective partnerships, he suggested, are those that persist beyond seasonal visibility and resist the urge to instrumentalize artists. As art fairs continue to expand geographically and luxury brands seek cultural legitimacy amid shifting consumer behavior, that restraint may be increasingly difficult to maintain. The appetite for handbags and the rest is ravenous, so it will be interesting to see how the luxury collaborations at these fairs play out. Do they threaten to overshadow the art itself? Watch this space in 2026, especially at the new mega-fairs launching in the Gulf, namely Frieze Abu Dhabi and Art Basel Qatar. These events are both launching in a region where the luxury market is booming. According to a recent report from Dubai-based retailer and distributor Chalhoub Group, the market jumped 6 percent last year to nearly $13 billion—and these two fairs are only likely to push that figure even higher.