The socialites changing modern art Several years ago, Force Villareal released a record under the name of Mother Inc, on which she and her friend Sandra Hamburg rapped about their early 2000s Sex and the City lifestyle. The music wasn't entirely convincing, but they none the less convinced Fendi to sponsor their launch party, and the Italian luxury brand decked out a nightclub with displays of handbags and fur. She met Remen, the slightly more demure of the pair, at the Rhode Island School of Design, where Force Villareal studied painting and Remen architecture. Now they are both married - Force Villareal to the light artist Leo Villareal, who is currently working on a project to light San Francisco's Bay Bridge; Remen to a Manhattan lawyer. Despite their Ab Fab tendencies, the duo aren't above the practicalities of the job, and the enormous amount of red tape that must be negotiated to, say, lay a 27,000sq ft floral carpet across Grand Central Station. When we meet in their small, street-level office in SoHo, they're sorting out future collaborations. The names that get tossed around are a roll call of the contemporary art world - Richard Prince, Urs Fischer, Rob Pruitt, Ed Ruscha. Playboy wants to get behind a towel launch in Miami; Barney's, the department store, wants to get involved. "We were pretty much the first arts organisation to use fashion and branding in a very natural and unforced way," Force Villareal says. Back in the Sixties, Ellsworth Kelly made a dress, Roy Liechtenstein did paper plates. Then it died off, with the exception of Jeff Koons. So we're bringing that tradition back in a mass way. We want to get art into people's homes. But we also have people like [mega collector] Eli Broad buying our towels. If Warhol took everyday objects and turned them into art; APF, says Remen, takes Pop Art and makes it mass market. Force Villareal estimates 90 per cent of the work is administration. "But it's all very enjoyable," she says. Part of their job is to convince artists - very often their friends - to donate images for a series of products they call WOW, or Works On Whatever. When the television show Gossip Girl wanted the art as up-to-date as the fashion in the show, they came to APF, who duly reproduced work - with permission, of course - for the show and then turned that into another sideline selling reproductions of contemporary art imagery on canvas. "They couldn't afford real art, so we had to make sanctioned fakes," explains Remen. We invited artists and they gave us images to reproduce. "They're genuinely good humans," says the photorealist artist Marilyn Minter. They're enthusiasts, and you can't get too many of those. Minter worked with APF to create a recyclable image of a Christmas tree for people who don't like the holiday. It didn't sell well because, explains Minter, "everybody likes Christmas." It's hard to have a hit every time, and one can't help wonder if some projects are sufficiently vetted. We meet on the corner of 46th Street and 8th Avenue off Times Square to look at a cluster of glass stars by Kiki Smith. Under the blazing June sun and encompassed by noisy, belching tourist buses, the piece is dwarfed by its surroundings and feels rather underwhelming. But many of APF's projects have been genuinely trailblazing. Most often mentioned is a performance at the Guggenheim Museum in 1998 for which the artist Vanessa Beecroft stood a formation of women of different shapes and sizes in the entrance of the museum in nothing but black Tom Ford-designed bathing suits. Though it now looks quaint, the display previewed a decade in which art and fashion would co-mingle, as designers sought artistic collaboration and art's sense of exclusivity, and art looked to fashion for its deep pockets and superior grasp of marketing. There was more going on, says Force Villareal: it spoke to the experience of women constantly being looked at and judged on appearance - as would necessarily be the case if you stood in a museum in nothing but a bikini. Force Villareal and Remen initiated another art coup in 2004, commissioning the artist Rudolf Stingel to cover Grand Central Terminal's Vanderbilt Hall with a massive floral carpet. The piece was called Plan B. Plan A, which got tangled in national security red tape and post-9/11 paranoia, was to build an entirely black house with a black interior in upstate New York. In 2008, APF helped British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster harness thousands of light bulbs to a metal frame to make Electric Fountain in New York's Rockefeller Center; in Las Vegas, the pair collaborated with dozens of artists to project videos outside the Cosmopolitan casino on the Strip. In one, the New York artist Aaron Young arranged for a gang of black-clad bikers from Harlem to skid their motorbikes over painted boards laid across the parade floor of the city's uptown Armory. In the deafening noise and choking smoke of burning rubber, the paint underneath was scored into abstract patterns. In what was their most successful collaboration, APF and the Berlin artists Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset opened a fake Prada store in the desert outside Marfa, the desolate west Texas town and art mecca where James Dean's Giant was shot and where the artist Donald Judd established his Chinati Foundation. Though not directly affiliated with Miuccia Prada, the store seemed to speak to the temporal nature of fashion with a practical joke. It only helped matters that the store was raided three days after it opened in 2005. Thieves tore the door off with a chain attached to a pickup truck. "They stole all the bags and shoes, but weren't aware the shoes were all one foot," recalls Remen. We still had the left feet so we resupplied and Miuccia sent over six more bags. The store hasn't been broken into since. It's rotting under the Texas sun as intended. It's been shot at. It's been graffitied, and people still go there to buy things," says Force Villareal. But it's not a shop and never was. It's just something to desire. You can press your face to the window. The duo's most impressive work recalls the great land-art artists of the Sixties, like Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in Utah, or Walter de Maria's Lightning Field in New Mexico. APF is a charity, its projects supported by donation, sales of merchandise and sponsorship, often by Sotheby's and UBS. With their help, they hope to build more ambitious installations in the vein of Nevada's magic mountains. One thing they're hoping to get off the ground again soon is the "UFO" that was flown around the Gulf of Gdansk and Rio de Janeiro in 2008. The artist Peter Coffin suspended it beneath a helicopter, and all who saw it loved it. Force Villareal and Remen would like to fly the sculpture over Miami and Washington, but the Department of Homeland Security isn't keen. Force Villareal, however, is confident she can talk them around. "It's something we're working on," she says.