PARIS – Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami are enjoying a second honeymoon. 

Hot on the heels of the reedition of their seminal collaboration from the early 2000s, the French luxury brand and the Japanese artist have reunited for another project: a dedicated Artycapucines collection unveiled on Tuesday with a spectacular booth at Art Basel Paris. 

Murakami and the Vuitton team have drawn inspiration from some of his best-known artworks, including his signature Panda character and “smiling flower” motifs, for 11 interpretations of the brand’s Capucines handbags that are bursting with color and sculptural detail. 

Since 2019, Vuitton has tapped 30 contemporary artists including Urs Fischer, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Ewa Juszkiewicz and Beatriz Milhazes to put their stamp on the bag. The results, at the crossroads between fashion and art, intrigued Murakami.

“They all looked like sculptures,” he told WWD. “It was very mysterious, and the process was very interesting.”

The artist noted that technology has progressed by leaps and bounds since he first collaborated with the brand on his Monogram Multicolore designs, unveiled at Vuitton’s spring 2003 show under then-creative director Marc Jacobs. 

The line was relaunched this year with more than 200 references, ranging from City Bags to accessories such as silk scarves, sunglasses, fashion jewelry, sneakers, perfume bottles and a skateboard.

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

Composed of more than 450 individual elements, it requires 75 days to assemble. The body of each tentacle is crafted out of resin, and the individual suckers are then painted and polished before being applied by hand. 

“There’s tremendous improvement and advancement of techniques on Louis Vuitton’s side, but on my side as well. I now have the 3D team in my studio, so we could really accurately and minutely exchange the corrections and revisions between the Louis Vuitton team and my team,” Murakami noted. 

Art and Commerce

The Vuitton stand at Art Basel is likewise dominated by an eight-meter-high sculpture of an octopus, inspired by Chinese lanterns, which Murakami described as a way of countering potential criticism of his ongoing practice of blurring his art practice with his brand collaborations.

Associate partner of Art Basel Paris for the third consecutive year, Vuitton also presented Murakami’s work in a dedicated booth at Art Basel Hong Kong in March. 

“To be completely honest, doing such a presentation at an art fair, as an artist, is very nerve-wracking,” he said, noting that 20 years ago, he faced blowback in some art circles for incorporating the Vuitton monogram into some of his paintings. “People always wonder about whether art should be marketed so much commercially.”

He noted that octopuses have been known to eat their own arms, a behavior that in Japan has been linked to the need to survive. His Mr. DOB character is a metaphor of his anxiety about cannibalizing himself through overexposure. 

“Sometimes I fear that I’m trapped in my own trap, and then starting to shrink,” the artist explained. “So even though this presentation is so huge, central and maybe a little too big in the Grand Palais context, because it’s my octopus, which is really about criticizing myself and reminding myself of these fears, I hope that’s forgiven.”

A self-confessed “otaku,” a Japanese term that loosely translates as “geek,” Murakami has long incorporated elements of sci-fi, anime and whimsical kawaii characters into his practice, but he also references traditional Japanese painting. 

The Capucines BB Golden Garden bag draws inspiration from his recent artwork “Ogata Kōrin’s Flowers,” an homage to the chrysanthemum fan designs of Ogata Kōrin, a renowned artist from the 18th-century Edo period. The bag is made of leather covered with gold leaf, with leather marquetry combining five different textures to render the blooms.

Other highlights of the collection include the Panda Clutch, hand-set with 6,250 rhinestones, and the Capubloom, inspired by the “Flower Matango” sculpture exhibited in the Hall of Mirrors at the Palace of Versailles in 2010. Here, it has been rendered as a sphere adorned with 3D resin flowers in more than 115 candy-colored shades. 

Possibly the most psychedelic of all is the Capucines Mini Mushroom, a silver canvas bag which – as the name indicates – is crawling with multicolored resin mushrooms 

Dynamiting Codes

Noting that all the bags were created in close collaboration with Vuitton’s design team, Murakami said he had no hesitation about playing with the Vuitton codes, for instance splicing the LV logo in half on the Capusplit BB, or painting his signature on black crocodile leather on the Capucines Mini Autograph.

When he originally partnered with the brand 20 years ago, merely tinkering with the colors of the monogram was seen as revolutionary. Nowadays, blowing up brand signifiers has become a trend, he noted. 

“Everyone does it in order to attract attention, so this time for this project, I don’t feel like I am trying to play a role of someone who destructs or disrupts. It’s really about Louis Vuitton’s creative team coming up with all sorts of ideas really freely,” he said. 

“I’m just in the back trying to support that creativity, so I really feel that with this collection, what’s the newest and what’s the most significant is the creativity of the people on the ground making these,” he added.

All the bags from the Artycapucines VII – Louis Vuitton x Takashi Murakami collection will be available in highly limited editions, though Vuitton declined to communicate on the number of bags and their price, referring inquiries to client advisers in stores. 

The original designs launched in the early 2000s were an instant hit, worn by “It” girls like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, Jessica Simpson and the fictional queen bee character Regina George in the cult movie “Mean Girls.” 

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

“I was surprised, when the reedition came out, that a lot of people – most people actually – didn’t know about my original collaboration 20 years ago. I really just assumed that they did, but including older customers, they all felt that this was new and fresh,” he reported. “In that sense, I think I’m reaching a new audience.”