Louis Vuitton Returns to the Art World for Its Latest Statement Handbag
“It’s the most obnoxious or provocative decision.” That’s what the abstract painter Josh Smith said when he received his most recent commission from an unlikely source, one that required him to work on an unfamiliar canvas: a luxury handbag.
Louis Vuitton called on the New York–based artist and five other contemporary masters, including the American painter Henry Taylor and the French sculptor Jean-Michel Othoniel, to turn its Capucines bags into works of art.
Best known for abstract oil paintings that feature his name boldly rendered in various incarnations, Smith, whose new show "Spectre" is now on view at David Zwirner, couldn’t resist the opportunity to unleash his signature on this most coveted of status symbols. The result is like a technicolor movie presented by Robert Bresson, the bold brushstrokes of Smith’s loopy handwriting against the restrained LV logo.
“I can imagine two people meeting for cocktails and my name becoming a conversation starter, like, ‘What’s that on your bag?’ ” he said in a statement.
Artists and designers have been having their own private cocktail party conversation for as long as there has been a modern fashion industry, together dreaming up elaborate confections to delight, and sometimes scandalize, their collectors. With the onset of a turbulent year, designers returned to a perennial wellspring to capture the public’s imagination while they try to reinvent the live runway experience.
“One of fashion’s raisons d’être is to transmit different kinds of savoir faire to people and let them discover infinite sources of inspiration,” says Dior Men artistic director Kim Jones, an art collector himself who collaborated with the Ghanaian portraitist Amoako Boafo for his spring/summer 2021 collection.
Salvador Dalí and Elsa Schiaparelli invented the modern art-fashion collaboration, coming up with transgressive follies like the Lobster Dress that were then infamously worn by the likes of the Duchess of Windsor.
Schiaparelli went on to inspire Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso; she thought of artists as kindred spirits. Her archrival, Coco Chanel, even referred to her as “that Italian artist who makes clothes.” It was not a compliment.
Now designers—entire fashion houses, in fact—are present-day Medicis. The late Achille Maramotti, the founder of Max Mara, acquired his first work, an Alberto Burri, in 1951, and went on to amass a vast collection. He wasn’t interested only in abstract expressionism; the collection also has works from the Renaissance, all of it now housed in the collezione that bears his name and which opened in Reggio Emilia in 2007.
Miuccia Prada and her husband Patrizio Bertelli, who installed a Carsten H?ller slide at their corporate headquarters, established their foundation 25 years ago, and today its permanent home in Milan (designed by Rem Koolhaas) is a world--renowned artistic destination, not to mention the venue where the brand stages its collections. Just this month, pieces from fall 2020, alongside specially designed sculptures by Koolhaas, will be auctioned at Sotheby’s to benefit UNESCO.
The Vuitton Artycapucines collection (the second iteration hits stores this month) is a personal project of executive vice president Delphine Arnault. Not only is it one of Vuitton’s biggest launches of the year, it follows earlier celebrated collaborations with Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons. The Arnaults themselves are collectors, and their Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, which was designed by Frank Gehry and which was forced to close down for the health crisis, reopened last month with a major Cindy Sherman retrospective.
Meanwhile their chief rival, Kering’s Fran?ois Pinault, asked Tadao Ando to transform Paris’s historic stock exchange into a 150,000-square-foot cultural temple that will open as the Bourse de Commerce contemporary art museum in 2021.
The relationship between artists and fashion houses has proven symbiotic. Brands burnish their images as cultural arbiters committed to more than mere commerce; artists are fast-tracked to mainstream recognition. “Artists make work to be seen,” says Isolde Brielmaier, a curator at large at the International Center of Photography who has helped broker a number of these partnerships. “The more people can see their work, engage with their work, be provoked by their work, the better.”
No stranger to artist collaborations, Dior Men’s Jones was immediately taken with Boafo’s work when he saw it at the Rubell Museum in Miami during last year’s annual Art Basel fair. He committed to building his entire collection around the artist’s finger-painted masterpieces, and cashmere turtle-necks featuring characters from Boafo’s -oeuvre, along with buttery leather Bermuda shorts and ivy embroidered blouses, are but a few of the results of their union, which has earned raves.
“The intensity of his portraits, the power of movement and the choice of colors in them—everything touches me in his work and the way he sees things,” Jones tells T&C. “In designing this collection, I wanted to share that passion.”
For Boafo, whose new exhibit is now on view at Mariane Ibrahim in Chicago, the partnership was a no-brainer. “What made me say yes was Kim’s passion about my work,” he says. There was another benefit: being blown away by the technical wizardry of an atelier translating his work onto fabric, “especially how my brushstrokes were replicated,” he says. “Seeing it given a personality on the runway, now, that gives me an amazing feeling that I cannot adequately capture in words.”
This story appears in the October 2020 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW
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