Takashi Murakami has partnered once more with Louis Vuitton, designing 11 Artycapucines bags featuring his signature motifs. The drop is accompanied by a whimsical installation featuring a large tentacled creature, on view at the Grand Palais during Art Basel Paris. The partnership marks more than 20 years since the artist and the fashion house began collaborating.
High up on a balcony overlooking the bustle of Art Basel Paris, there’s a swirl of tentacles threatening to burst into the Grand Palais. Reaching more than 25-feet in height and covered in eye-like suction cups, it would make for a decent science fiction image or else a dark metaphor for the art world. Instead, it’s an installation for Takashi Murakami’s latest collaboration with Louis Vuitton, one the company calls “a whimsical immersion into the artist’s quintessential kaleidoscopic universe.”
The French fashion house has partnered with the art fair for the third consecutive year and those who trek up to the Balcon d’Honneur will encounter the cutesy, technicolored world synonymous with Japanese artist. There’s a cat-eared octopus idling on the landing, a giant plushy ball formed of his exuberant flower motifs, and a phalanx of plinths housing Louis Vuitton’s newest art bags.
Four of the bags incorporate Murakami’s iconic smiling flower. The one that strays furthest is the Capucines BB Golden Garden, whose dazzling background is peppered with the sakura flowers of the cherry tree. It’s essentially a portable version of the flowery gold leaf paintings that Murakami has been making in homage to the work of Ogata Korin, the 17th-century Edo artist whose chrysanthemum and peakcock screens are revered in Japan.
Other bags take a more direct approach. There’s the Mini Autograph, a black rhombus with the artist’s signature, the Capucines EW Rainbow, a soft semicircle with a lolling tongue that could well double as a pillow, and the Capubloom, which miniaturizes the Flower Matango sculpture that graced the Hall of Mirrors in 2010’s “Murakami Versailles,” the artist’s first retrospective in France.
Another work that comes to life is Dragon in Clouds Indigo Blue (2010), Murakami’s 12-foot-long work that draws on the eight-panel exploration of dragons and clouds by the 18th-century Edo painter Soga Shōhaku. In Capucines East West Dragon, we meet a close-up of Murakami’s dozy-eyed mythical creature, its whiskers curling around a bag fitted with a scaly black handle. Murakami’s beloved panda also gets a cameo in the form of a clutch fixed with more than 6,000 rhinestones.
The relationship between Louis Vuitton and Murakami dates back to 2003, when Murakami was the first artist invited by Marc Jacobs to reimagine the company’s classic bag, something he did through the “Monogram Multicolore” collection, which deployed 33 colors and his signature motifs across pieces. Two decades on, the lines between art and fashion appear to have blurred further.
Cover: The Takashi Murakami x Louis Vuitton installation for Artycapuchines at the Grand Palais, Paris. Photo: courtesy Dominique Maitre.
