Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/496780
204 CULTURED "I hadn't heard of him and I didn't know his work, but I started to do some research very quickly!" —Laure Heriard-Dubreuil t was 2007 when Parisian Laure Heriard-Dubreuil, then 28, yet already a fashion veteran of Yves Saint Laurent and Balenciaga, decamped to Miami to open her own idiosyncratic boutique. In a city where style had long centered more on bikinis than Bottega Veneta, and six-inch heels were, quite literally, high fashion, it was a bold move. But her taste and instincts proved faultless and Heriard-Dubreuil turned the Webster, into one of the world's top boutiques. Along with the original store, housed in a repurposed Art Deco hotel on South Beach, Heriard-Dubreuil opened a menswear store and a second Webster at the Bal Harbour Shops and will open another outpost in Houston this fall. Her move to Miami wasn't only professionally prescient. The next December, at a private party during Art Basel, a friend introduced her to Aaron Young, the tousled and handsome artist known for his splashy, site-specific installations. "I hadn't heard of him and I didn't know his work, but I started to do some research very quickly," she laughs. "The next day, he came in to do some shopping at the Webster." Young, now her fiancé, recalls that same evening more simply. "I saw Laure, and my friend told me 'Get in line.' I decided to cheat the line." Since that fateful night, California native Young, 42, and Heriard-Dubreuil, a scion of the family behind Rémy Martin, have become a creative power couple, a prestige pair straddling both fashion and art. There's long been kinship between these fields—Sadie Coles and Juergen Teller and Mara Hoffman and Javier Piñón—but the relationship has grown closer in recent times. Heriard-Dubreuil points to Art Basel Miami Beach as a crucial booster, as it has become as much a fixture for fashionistas as the arterati. "A lot of the Webster clientele are art collectors. The crowd from Art Basel is my number-one clientele." Concept stores like hers have even borrowed the art world's lexicon, with curated stock and limited editions; indeed, Heriard-Dubreuil painstakingly selects pieces and often commissions editions for the store. She is, however, quick to emphasize that unlike gallery spaces, "we want people to take off their shoes and touch everything," she says. "That's why we have thick carpets and deep velvet couches. It's not a museum." As for Young, he believes that the increasing cross-pollination between creative fields has been an inevitable byproduct of an ever more digital world. "People have become more susceptible and more seduced by ideas that aren't just from different places—London, New York or somewhere in Asia—but also different points of view and perspectives. Through social media, everything starts to compress into itself." Certainly, he and his fiancée have happily collaborated creatively in their seven years together, like on the renovation of Young's New York loft where he pushed to reupholster a 1970s table in red and bubblegum pink vinyl, which is now one of her favorite pieces. And while Young likes to let ideas float and find their way, "she's more concrete and pushes an idea through. Her gut instincts with things are always on point." Professionally, the couple has made several joint sorties, too. Heriard-Dubreuil once partnered with Young's former dealer Stefania Bortolami on a month-long pop-up gallery on the Webster's third floor, and often treats her fiancé as a test subject when she trials menswear. "He always thinks outside of the box, and I like when he comes to buy things and likes what I've selected." Young has standalone connections with fashion's elite. After staging his performance piece Greeting Card at New York's Park Avenue Armory, where 13 bikers carved patterns into plywood panels on the floor as spectators gawked in gas masks, it was Tom Ford who offered to host the after party. They've now become friends. Young is typically modest even when discussing his stint as the anchor model for adverts by luxury menswear line, Zilli. "I used to be a model for Esprit when I was growing up, so it was kind of going back to something I knew how to do," he says, "But Laure has put the cap on the modeling bottle for me." Perhaps their greatest collaboration, though, is one-year-old son, Marcel. "He's a mini version of Aaron," Heriard-Dubreuil says. "I don't know if he'll have his creative skills, but he definitely has his looks and his behavior, and I can see so many common things between the two of them. And it makes me so happy." I