Louis Vuitton's Artycapucines Bag by 6 Leading Contemporary Artists
For the fourth year in a row, Louis Vuitton invited six leading contemporary artists to transform the Capucines from blank canvas to limited-edition artwork. A testament to the iconic bag’s ability to inspire unbridled creativity, Amelie Bertrand, Daniel Buren, Ugo Rondinone, Peter Marino, Park Seo-Bo and Kennedy Yanko have brought their unique creative visions to the bag’s timeless design. Colorful and joyful, the Swiss artist’s design is an homage to the clown and rainbow motifs often found in his oeuvre.
“My work is embedded in an observation in nature and its relation to the human condition.” Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (b. 1964, Brunnen) is recognized as one of the major voices of his generation, an artist who composes searing meditations, borrowing from ancient and modern cultural sources and exuding pathos and humor.
Opting to use color as the main attraction for his Artycapucines, the artist chose two archetypal symbols that he uses in his work: the clown and the rainbow. As a recognizable nonbinary character, the clown is designed to entertain large audiences, something he inverts in his work, while the rainbow is a communal archetype for unity and peace and refers equally to the gay liberation movement.
The stunning harlequin pattern on Rondinone’s bag is created by painstakingly hand-embroidering nearly 15,000 small beads to the bag’s leather body to create a sense of volume, a process that takes over 100 hours for each bag. Among the nearly 500 beads in each diamond are 3D-printed flowers inspired by a series of sculptures produced by Rondinone in 1988, and reminiscent of those in the Louis Vuitton Monogram pattern. The handle is a hand-crafted translucent resin, designed so that in bright light its colors are “projected” onto the bag’s flap.
As principal of his New York-based architecture practice, renowned architect Peter Marino is credited with redefining modern luxury with its award-winning work that places equal emphasis on architecture and interior design.
For his Artycapucines, Marino took inspiration from a medieval box he saw in a 14th century building in Venice. Placed near the monumental staircase designed by Italian architect Mauro Codussi, the box had straps and a medieval key, elements he recreated on Louis Vuitton’s iconic bag.
The body of Marino’s completely monochrome bag is made of a precise patchwork of hand-cut strips of rich calfskin to which 315 lightweight studs are applied for a visually potent and tactile look and feel. The exterior also boasts an entirely new and exclusive type of slide-bolt closure, inspired by Marino’s vintage trunk: when folded over the front, the bag’s flap can be secured with the black metal bar that features an enamel Louis Vuitton Monogram flower. The visually arresting leather handle – with its whip-like detailing – is braided and assembled by hand.
“I never attempt to create real spaces, only painted ones,” says French Artist Amélie Bertrand (b. 1985, Cannes) of her visual universe of synthetic psychedelia, skewed perspectives, and shallow horizons.
Her hallucinatory images – with their leitmotifs of chains, camouflage, tiles and tropical plants, all in bright and gradated colors – feel both natural and artificial, a series of flattened landscapes that sit somewhere between saccharine dream and pop nightmare. Considering how the light would hit the Capucines’ surface, she imagined its phosphorescent handle and surface components using daylight to charge in order to then illuminate up the night, evoking the internal light that a computer emits.
Thanks to an innovative pigment treatment, Bertrand’s Artycapucines resin handle, interior and exterior tile lines, studs on the base, and stitching on the shoulder strap all radiate a warm phosphorescence. The richly gradated color scheme of the bag’s calfskin body is created using a meticulous hand-sprayed paint technique before the luminous decorative lines are painstakingly applied. A pair of oversized flowers and a chain – both recurring elements in Bertrand’s work – are attached to the bag as visually arresting ornamentation. These two charms are also painted as shadows – another Bertrand leitmotif – with the chain’ silhouette then embossed in the leather. The metal chain itself has a beautiful and kaleidoscopic iridescence thanks to the “scarabeo” galvanizing process, which is also used on the metal LV logo and the Monogram flower stud that sits on the delicately colored flap.
“The Artycapucines has a really simple design: a trapezoid base and the art of a circle as the handle. Everything starts from there.” One of the world’s leading contemporary artists, for over 60 years Daniel Buren (b. 1938, Boulogne-Billancourt) has constructed an oeuvre exploring the relationships between art and its physical and intellectual structures, and our perception of light and space.
Whereas a specific space or precise environment is usually at the heart of his work, for his Artycapucines, Buren saw the subject as a fixed object with which he “composed”. By abstracting the bag’s form, two shapes emerged: a trapezoid and a circle.
The handcrafted handle of Buren’s bag is a resin semicircle, polished to a satin-like finish, which becomes a complete circle mirrored on both sides of the bag. Employing the artist’s trademark black-and-white stripes to stunning ends, this effect required bespoke changes to the Capucines’ usual design. The bag is designed as symmetrical halves, each side in a differently colored Louis Vuitton Taurillon leather with a matte treatment. The combinations of white-orange, white-green, black-white and red-black evoke Buren’s “Observatory of Light”, a spectacular large-scale artwork installed on the exterior of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2016.
“One time, I was looking at a valley by Mount Bandai. The valley was aligned with the sun, so it appeared to be almost neon red. The color was so intense that it felt like I was looking at a flame that was chasing me to my death. That moment acted as a reminder that I’m only a tiny being in front of the vastness of nature”. One of Korea’s most celebrated artists, Park Seo-Bo is the founder of Dansaekhwa, a movement that altered the course of Korean art with its ideas of the purposelessness of actions and the spiritual benefits of endless repetition.
Adapted from an original painting from his Écriture” series, Seo-Bo’s Artycapucines recreates this moment he experienced in nature, meticulously translated into bag form with the assistance of his grandson, the designer Park Jifan.
To recreate the image’s beautifully tactile texture, the bag’s calfskin is first treated with a brushstroke-like “coup de pinceau” effect, before a highly detailed 3D rubber injection – based upon a high-definition scan of the painting – is then carefully applied to the leather. To ensure that each bag is a perfect reproduction, the bright red and burgundy leather is then hand-finished to ensure a deep patina.
“Once we’d figured out the colors and style and how to create the bag itself, I was particularly interested in making something that was functional.” American artist Kennedy Yanko (b. 1988, St. Louis) works in found metal and “paint skin”, a material she makes by pouring large amounts of paint, letting it dry, and using the sheet-like form to create new sculptural compositions both flowing, yet solid.
For her Artycapucines, Yanko brought her signature effect to a new material, leather, working with Louis Vuitton artisans in an intensive process that yielded a unique anthropomorphic quality. As well as being visually striking, the bag is also remarkably versatile: by removing its leather handle it transforms into a clutch or by attaching its special strap to a small envelope pocket that nests within the main bag.
To recreate the aesthetic of her work, the bag’s body is first 3D printed with rust and weathering effects before expert artisans introduce a special patina and delicate touches of gold pigment, emphasizing the paint skin’s ripples and folds. The bag’s form is directly pulled from a swath of draped and folded paint skin, which was scanned and 3D printed to create a mold onto which the leather is then applied, worked and stiffened.
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