Not everybody visits artwork museums and galleries. But everybody sees purses within the streets — and quantity the home windows at Louis Vuitton.
Which is why each established and rising artists relish initiatives like Artycapucines, whose third version options the likes of Vik Muniz and Zeng Fanzhi, together with Gregor Hildebrandt, Donna Huanca, Huang Yuxing and Paola Pivi.
Each artist’s interpretation of the Capucines purse — using embroideries, marquetry, inkjet printing and different painstaking methods — are produced in a restricted version of 200 and go on sale at Vuitton shops worldwide on the finish of October, priced at 6,700 euros.
Delphine Arnault, govt vice chairman in command of supervising all of Vuitton’s product-related actions, mentioned the chosen artists are all given carte blanche to rework the bag as a clean canvas.
“Both the artists and Louis Vuitton have the same objectives — to make something special and unique that truly combines their universe and creativity with Louis Vuitton’s exceptional savoir faire,” she advised WWD. “Some of them come with sketches, others visit our ateliers as a starting point, but at the end of the day, the creative process very much depends on their vision and the message they wish to put across. Ultimately, no matter how established or not the artists are, this total sensation of limitless creativity seems to draw them to join us on this exciting project.”
Ditto for customers.
“We have many clients who search for uniqueness, something that they cannot find somewhere else,” Arnault mentioned. “The first two chapters of this collection were incredibly successful and sold out instantly. Through pre-orders, some bags were fully sold out even before the official in-store launch. These pieces really are collector items.”
In her view, the Artycapucines luggage are usually not solely bespoke and restricted, they “bring the worlds of fashion and art together, two things that are very appealing to them. These pieces are as much for the Capucines fans who love art as they are for art collectors who love the idea of owning a piece of art on such a unique medium,” she added.
Conversation starters for certain, every purse boasts a curious backstory.
Pivi, an Italian artist, based mostly hers on a 2007 efficiency piece titled “One Cup of Cappuccino Then I Go” that concerned releasing a stay leopard right into a gallery area put in with 3,000 pretend cups of cappuccino. The wild cat tiptoed over a row of them gingerly, napped on them, and finally scattered them over the ground.
Four images of the efficiency have been bought as a restricted sequence, and Pivi unearthed a fifth, by no means proven earlier than, for her Capucines.
Artist Paola Pivi in her studio.
Christophe Coënon
The purse might solely depict 30 cups of milky espresso, rendered in porcelain-like white patent leather-based after which inserted utilizing the marquetry approach. Fluffy lambskin serves because the frothy tops, which have been then gilded with gold leaf.
The leopard, proven lounging on a plinth surrounded by overturned cups, is embroidered and over-printed to convey a fur-like appear and feel. Pivi added two safari-style pockets on the entrance, a primary for the Capucines, which is called after the Paris avenue the place founder Louis Vuitton opened his first retailer in 1854 — and never a caffeinated beverage.
Fanzhi’s visually busy bag is an interpretation of his interpretation of a well-known self-portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. It took threads and yarns in 42 completely different colours and a few 700,000 embroidery stitches, together with tufting, to approximate the Chinese artists’ heavy brushstrokes and layers of paint.
Those much less eager on coloration and a fan of music would possibly take into account the bag by Gregor Hildebrandt, a German artist who makes use of vinyl information and magnetic tape as key supplies, usually transferring cassette tapes’ magnetic coating onto double-sided tape to create powdery patterns. It’s his means of integrating music bodily into his work.
“My paintings hold secrets about what music or imagery is contained within the physical audio and VHS tapes,” he defined. “And with the Capucines, you’re curious about what is in the bag — a lipstick, a key to someone’s house?”
He likened the purse to a totable “retrospective of my work” — full with an LV emblem carved from an actual 33-rpm file.
For Gregor Hildebrandt’s bag, the LV emblem was carved out of a vinyl file.
Piotr Stoklosa/Courtesy of LV
Muniz, the Brazilian artist well-known for his chocolate drawings and utilizing family waste for artwork making, opted to upcycle “heritage” leathers from the Vuitton workshops.
Like most individuals within the challenge, he was fascinated with the savoir-faire employed to signify artworks — in his case, a mosaic of summary cutouts in off-white tones titled “Quais Tutto.”
For his Capucines, he switched on the brilliant coloration and went for 154 childlike cutouts of random objects — a cactus, pineapple, snake, stiletto, palm tree, dragon, airplane — plus some Monogram shapes. These are scattered throughout the white leather-based purse to playful impact.
“The challenge for me was figuring out how to make the bag work, navigating all the decisions about form and configuration and technique and finish,” he associated. “When I see the bag, I can tell that so much skill and attention was put into its creation.”
Yuxing and Huanca took painterly approaches.
Yuxing, who zhushes up conventional Chinese gongbi portray with fluorescent colours and unintentional paint drips, reprised one in all his fantasy landscapes that includes rainbow-like mountains. This concerned printing on the leather-based and utilizing tufting-stitch and “point de bouclette” embroideries to approximate his vibrant brushstrokes.
He mentioned he’s intrigued by the truth that his art work might be carried round elsewhere all through the world. “The bag will accompany different conversations and different everyday activities, rather than simply remain static in an exhibition.”
For Donna Huanca’s bag, dense embroideries have been hand-painted in locations.
Piotr Stoklosa
Chicago-born Huanca usually incorporates performers — their our bodies painted or encased in armor-like clothes — into what she dubs “visceral experiences.”
Her swirls of blue and white resemble climate patterns, however are actually associated to her physique portray. “Painting on skin is very freeing,” she mentioned. “This bag is a collage of past works, as well as sensations of texture that resurface in my works.”
The artisans at Vuitton first 3D-printed the swirling colours onto white leather-based earlier than using three completely different embroidery methods after which hand-painting over a few of them to approximate the unique canvases.
The metallic hoops that maintain the handles have been excellent for Huanca’s concentrate on the feminine physique: She made hers resemble the piercing rings used for septums.
The Capucines bag was launched in 2013 as Vuitton launched into an upscaling drive and launched higher-priced luggage.
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