Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami launch handbag collection

Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami are enjoying their second honeymoon.

Following a revival of their groundbreaking collaboration in the early 2000s, the French luxury brand and the Japanese artist have joined forces once again for another project: a dedicated Artycapucines collection launched on Tuesday at Art Basel in Paris on a spectacular stand.

Murakami and the Vuitton team drew inspiration from some of his most famous artworks, including his iconic panda characters and “smiling flower” patterns, to create 11 interpretations of the brand’s Capucines bags, which are filled with color and sculptural details.

Since 2019, Louis Vuitton has hired 30 contemporary artists including Urs Fischer, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Ewa Juszkiewicz and Beatriz Milhazes to leave their mark on bags. The result of the intersection of fashion and art intrigued Murakami.
“They all look like sculptures,” he told WWD. “It’s mysterious and the process is interesting.”

The artist noted that technology has come a long way since he first collaborated with the brand on his Monogram Multicolore design, which debuted at Vuitton’s spring 2003 show under then-creative director Marc Jacobs.

The collection was relaunched this year with more than 200 styles, ranging from city bags to accessories such as scarves, sunglasses, fashion jewelry, sneakers, perfume bottles and skateboards.

The Artycapucines project goes a step further, with fully three-dimensional creations such as the Capucines Mini Tentacle, a pink bag inspired by his 2017 sculpture “DOBtopus,” which transformed the artist’s alter ego Mr. DOB into an octopus.

It consists of more than 450 individual components and takes 75 days to assemble. The body of each tentacle is made from resin, and the individual suction cups are then painted and polished, then applied by hand.

“The technology on Louis Vuitton’s side has improved and progressed tremendously, and so has my side. Now I have a 3D team in the studio, so we can exchange corrections and revisions really accurately and meticulously between the Louis Vuitton team and my team,” Murakami noted.

Arts and Commerce

The Louis Vuitton stand at Art Basel was also dominated by an eight-meter-tall octopus sculpture inspired by Chinese lanterns, which Murakami described as a way to counter potential criticism that he was blurring his artistic practice from collaborating with the brand.

Louis Vuitton is an associate partner of Art Basel in Paris for the third year in a row, and in March also displayed Takashi Murakami’s work at a dedicated booth at Art Basel in Hong Kong.

“Honestly, as an artist, it’s very nerve-wracking to do a presentation like this at an art fair,” he said, noting that 20 years ago he faced pushback from some art circles for incorporating the Vuitton monogram into some of his paintings. “People always wonder if art should be so commercial.”

He noted that octopuses are known to eat their own arms, a behavior thought in Japan to be related to the need for survival. His “Mr. DOB” persona is a metaphor for his anxiety about cannibalizing himself through overexposure.

“Sometimes I worry that I’m stuck in my own trap and start to withdraw,” the artist explains. “So even though this speech is so huge and so central and maybe a little too big in the context of the Grand Palais because it’s my octopus that’s actually criticizing myself and reminding myself of these fears, I hope that can be forgiven.”

Murakami, a self-confessed “otaku” (a Japanese term that roughly translates to “geek”), has long incorporated elements of science fiction, anime and whimsical kawaii characters into his creations, but he also references traditional Japanese painting.

The Capucines BB Golden Garden bag is inspired by his recent artwork “Ogata Kōrin’s Flowers”, paying homage to the chrysanthemum fan design of famous 18th-century Edo period artist Ogata Kōrin. The bag is made of leather covered with gold foil, and the leather inlay combines five different textures to represent flowers.

Other highlights from the collection include the Panda clutch, hand-set with 6,250 rhinestones, and the Capubloom, inspired by the “Flower Matango” sculpture displayed in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in 2010. Here, it’s rendered as a sphere decorated with 3D resin flowers in over 115 candy-colored shades.

Perhaps the most psychedelic of them all is the Capucines Mini Mushroom, a silver canvas bag that, as its name suggests, is crawling with colorful resinous mushrooms.

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Murakami notes that all bags are created in close collaboration with the Vuitton design team, and he doesn’t hesitate to play with Vuitton elements, such as splicing the LV logo in half on the Capusplit BB or painting his signature on the black crocodile leather on the Capucines Mini Autograph.

When he first worked with the brand 20 years ago, simply changing the color of the monogram was considered revolutionary. He noted that blowing up brand logos has become a trend these days.

“Everyone does it to attract attention, so this time with this project I didn’t feel like I was trying to play a disruptive or disruptive role. It was actually Louis Vuitton’s creative team taking real freedom to come up with ideas,” he said.

“I’m just trying to support that creativity from behind, so I really feel like the newest and most important thing in this series is the creativity of the people who make these products,” he added.

All bags in the Artycapucines VII – Louis Vuitton x Takashi Murakami collection will be available in highly limited editions, but Vuitton declined to reveal the number of bags or their prices, instead referring inquiries to customer advisors in-store.

Launched in the early 2000s, the original design was an instant hit and has been worn by “It” girls like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Jessica Simpson, and the fictional queen bee character Regina George from the cult film “Mean Girls.”

While Murakami hoped the reissue would allow him to reach a new generation of fans, the results exceeded his expectations.

“When the reissue came out, I was surprised how many people – most people, actually – didn’t know about my original collaboration from 20 years ago. I really just assumed they knew, but even regular customers, they all thought it was new and fresh,” he reported. “In that sense, I think I’m reaching a new audience.”