He once made a £1m life-size sculpture of supermodel Cara Delevingne out of 7,000 ecstasy pills, to draw attention to the drug’s impact on popular culture.

Now the anonymous British artist Chemical X is courting controversy again after erecting a row of tents in Los Angeles’s homeless district, Skid Row, each carrying the logo and branding of the many luxury labels that can be found just over 10 miles away in the Beverly Hills shopping strip of Rodeo Drive.

Entitled Skid Rodeo Drive – The Street Where Luxury and Poverty Meet, 12 tents featuring logos of, among others, Louis Vuitton, Prada and Chanel went up last Thursday on San Julian Street in the heart of Skid Row.

“I didn’t want to make poverty porn: I wanted to try to find something that replicated the way I felt,” the artist told the Observer in a rare interview. “I wanted to make something that you’re not going to see, that’s what makes it powerful and confrontational.

“We predetermine the way we feel about poverty and poor people, we feel pity for them, but the story for me was: this is a city, these are your neighbours. To bring those two things together amplifies them both. You take poor people and put them on Rodeo Drive, it just looks like poor people begging. But when you put it the other way round, it’s confusing. People don’t know what to think.”

The tents appeared the day before new figures confirmed that there had been a 12% rise in homelessness in the city over the last 12 months and amid mounting concerns about conditions on Skid Row.

CNN reported that scores of business owners who have goods warehouses near Skid Row are pressing the city’s authorities to tackle the rising number of tent fires, some of which, the broadcaster said, were being started by gang members trying to collect “rent” from tent-dwellers.

Chemical X said he had worked with community leaders, local artists and residents to create the piece, which went up for just one day, after which the tents were donated to the citizens of the street.

He had conceived the idea after visiting LA to sell some of his work and seeing tents on Skid Row. “It goes on and on and on, each side street filled with tents. And you’re going ‘this is Los Angeles’: two blocks away there’s all the glitz. The proximity was the thing that got me more than anything else. This is the corner of the carpet under which LA sweeps its detritus. It’s very unsettling.”

In contrast with Britain, he said, there were no safety nets for those who ended up on the streets in LA.

“We found this guy in his car, dragged him out. He was swallowing his tongue, turning blue. I thought ‘fuck me he’s going to die’.” Parademics arrived and took him into their ambulance. “Then 15 minutes later he gets out of the ambulance and drives off. They had given him Narcan [the drug used for opioid overdoses]. There was no point taking him to the hospital because he can’t pay.”

The reaction to the work – promoted on social media – was broadly positive, the artist said. It remains to be seen what the major fashion houses think. “I’m waiting to see how they respond. Some may be litigious, some may be open to dialogue. I’d love to put the tents up outside their stores on Rodeo Drive. We could have an amnesty, people bring in an old handbag, get some money off a new handbag and sell the old one off to raise money for the people on the street.”

Chemical X enjoys a strong following in the fashion world. Delevingne, who models for several fashion labels, is said to be a collector of his work, raising questions about whether the artist himself is a beneficiary of an industry he has implicitly criticised.

“There’s no getout clause,” he conceded. “In the end we do what we can with what we can. It was a commentary on popular culture. Art exists to reflect society back on itself and that’s what I’m doing.”