Louis Vuitton is going crazy, on a global scale.
In its most extensive collaboration with a fine artist to date, the luxury giant is launching ready-to-wear leather goods, accessories and even perfume in collaboration with Yayoi Kusama, alongside dedicated campaigns and a series of high-profile activations. .
Steven Meisel’s images of Gisele Bündchen, Liya Kebede, Devon Aoki, Christy Turlington, Anok Yai and other famous models appear on December 26 in Japanese fashion magazines. The first products will launch on January 1 in Japan and China, considered a pre-launch, and should be in all 460 Louis Vuitton boutiques worldwide on January 6.
Delphine Arnault, who as Vuitton’s executive vice president oversees all of its product-related activities, described the collaboration as a coming together of two like-minded design studios and ateliers obsessed with perfection in concept, execution and craftsmanship.
In an interview at Vuitton’s headquarters in Paris, with its jaw-dropping views of the River Seine, Arnault said the project was a year and a half in the making, conceived and realized amid the coronavirus pandemic via Zoom and web technology. file sharing. the French capital and Tokyo, where the 93-year-old artist resides.
“One of the aspects of his work is happiness, and we thought it would be really refreshing after the pandemic if the worlds of Vuitton and the world of Kusama met again,” he said, alluding to a successful first collaboration in 2012. . .
Vuitton began teasing the latest connection last May, when Nicolas Ghesquière, the artistic director of the brand’s women’s collections, accessorized some of his cruise 2023 looks with polka-dot bags.
A Louis Vuitton sandal with metal spikes.
Courtesy of Louis Vuitton
The pace has picked up in recent weeks. One Tokyo takeover involved landmarks such as Tokyo Tower, Zojoji Temple, and Tokyo Station with a mix of physical installations and augmented reality activations.
“The reaction was amazing,” enthused Arnault.
In fact, an Instagram post of the anamorphic billboard Vuitton installed in Tokyo’s bustling Shinjuku district has amassed more than 10 million views. It depicts Kusama looking out of a Vuitton trunk decorated with some animated fruit friends.
Meanwhile, other posts on Instagram, where Vuitton has more than 50 million followers, have shown Kusama handing out spotted pumpkins to Dutch model Rianne Van Rompaey, one of the faces of the campaign, who also appears to be standing on the Bright red artist’s signature. bob hairstyle.
Arnault hinted at other citywide acquisitions in Paris, London and New York next year. “It’s really important to communicate globally, but also to work locally,” he said, promising “some surprises” in different parts of each city, along with pop-ups, pop-ups, augmented reality features and even a gaming app.
A second delivery of products is scheduled for March 31, supported by another still-secret ad campaign.
Kusama is best known for her obsession with polka dots, which she has been painting since she was 10 years old and applying to canvases, tree trunks, entire rooms, and even people. She has also made collages, soft sculptures, and performance.
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Courtesy
Known for her exacting approach (every point in her “infinity” paintings is carefully placed), Kusama is a prolific artist who has participated in the conceptual, feminist, minimalist, surreal, pop, and abstract art movements since her first appearance in the scene. in the 1950s.
Arnault praised Kusama as one of the most famous female artists working today and one of the most important artists to emerge from Japan.
“It’s a very inclusive art,” he said. “He talks to everyone, he can talk to a child; You can talk to an intellectual. It is not too difficult to understand, although it is very complex.
Huge lines form whenever museums feature one of Kusama’s “Infinity Mirror Rooms,” which allow viewers to gaze at endless reflections of colored light.
Arnault marveled that Kusama’s art has been so prescient of today’s appetite for immersive experiences and works that are so irresistibly Instagrammable and shareable.
The Vuitton collaboration encompasses Kusama’s “infinity dots” and metallic dots, first introduced in 1966, along with pumpkin and floral motifs.
A silk square patterned with “infinity dots” and a pumpkin.
Courtesy of Louis Vuitton
Arnault pulled out a Capucine leather bag, one of the most expensive items in the range at €8,800, and a small Alma canvas bag, each covered in colorful but irregular dots.
“We have a sense of perfection, of detail, of creativity, of innovation, and we felt that Ms. Kusama’s studio spoke the same language,” Arnault explained, a smile on his face. “She has an obsession with knitting. And we have an obsession with the monogram.”
Vuitton’s repeating design, featuring the initials LV interspersed with stylized flowers, first debuted on trunks in 1896 and has become one of the brand’s most powerful and popular symbols.
Arnault explained that the Vuitton teams were tasked with reproducing the dots that Kusama once hand-painted on a trunk. After countless tries, they achieved the desired effect: the dots appear to float on the leather goods, glimmering here and there as if Kusama had just brushed off each circle, the paint still wet.
Louis Vuitton x Yayoi Kusama Keepall bag with hand-painted polka dot print.
Courtesy of Louis Vuitton
“Everything was done with extreme precision,” he stressed. “The amazing thing about working with artists is that they really push the boundaries… It makes us even better and pushes the boundaries too.”
She gestured to a photo on the wall of a crooked, top-handle Vuitton bag by architect Frank Gehry, one of six “iconoclasts” chosen for a 2014 collaboration.
“There isn’t a single straight line on that bag, so for the atelier it was a big challenge,” she recalled.
Arnault described a massive company-wide effort to realize the Kusama project, which involved all of the company’s product departments, supply chain, industrial, design, marketing, retail, communications and visual merchandising teams. Kusama’s outlets will even invade the brand’s dotcom business, with a temporary makeover slated for its online store.
Artistic collaborations date back more than a century at Vuitton, to the founder’s grandson, Gaston-Louis Vuitton, who recruited artists and designers like Pierre-Emile Legrain and Camille Cless-Brothier for products and window displays in the 1920s and ’30s.
The pace picked up considerably during the Marc Jacobs era from 1997 to 2013, when he invited Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince and Kusama to collaborate on capsule collections. In 2013, Murakami’s hit collaboration, which featured colorful versions of the monogram, some interspersed with eyeballs, was said to have generated a tenth of the brand’s revenue that year.
When Kusama first met Jacobs, welcoming him to her Tokyo studio in 2006, she presented the designer with a Vuitton Ellipse bag, the canvas monogram of which she had painted with dots. He invited her to collaborate on a line of clothing and accessories in 2012, some decorated with her tentacle-shaped “nerves” motif.
In recent years, Vuitton has also collaborated with Sol LeWitt and Jeff Koons, also inviting numerous emerging and established contemporary artists to participate in its Artycapucines project each year.
Vuitton’s “cultural dimension” reached another zenith with the 2014 opening of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a private museum that has exhibited works by Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh, Olafur Eliasson, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cindy Sherman and Egon Shiele.
Most recently, Vuitton was featured as the only luxury brand to set up a stand at the inaugural Paris+ by Art Basel fair to highlight its long-standing relationships with artists.
“I think Vuitton really has the legitimacy to do collaborations with artists, and it’s the most culturally linked brand,” Arnault said, characterizing them as a win-win.
While he declined to discuss numbers, Arnault said his collections made with artists are “extremely successful” commercially. On the other hand, artists “want to do it because it gives them access to another audience.”
“This collaboration will be in all of our windows, it will be in our advertising to expose their art to people who wouldn’t necessarily have been in a museum,” he explained.
Arnault noted that all of Vuitton’s artistic collaborations end up being highly collectible and often fetch a higher value on the resale market. They attract art collectors and clients who may not be familiar with the artists, but are intrigued to learn more, she added.
For serious art aficionados or party goers, 40 champagne trunks customized by Kusama Studios are up for grabs at €400,000 each.
The print campaign, with its multi-generational cast of models, is meant to reflect that Kusama’s art appeals to everyone. Her tagline, “Creating Infinity,” nods to a key theme in Kusama’s work and to Vuitton’s traveling roots, dreamy storytelling and seemingly endless trajectory of growth.
The images will also appear as billboards, street furniture, 3D screens and banners in cities like Paris; London; Munich; Dubai; NY; The Angels; Tokyo; seoul; Taipei, Taiwan; and Shanghai, Chengdu and Shenzhen, China.
Source: news.google.com