Since the first collection in 2019, the Capucines bag – named after Rue Neuve-des-Capucines, the Parisian street where Louis Vuitton opened his first store in 1854 – has provided a perfect blank canvas for 29 contemporary artists to create an Artycapucines. The five latest designs pay testament to the collection’s ability to unite the artists’ talent and invention with the ingenuity and craftsmanship of the Maison’s masterful artisans.
Billie Zangewa – born in Malawi and based in South Africa – uses deliberately imperfect patchworks of raw silk to create landscapes and portraits, and her Artycapucines sees her 2020 work The Swimming Lesson – featuring her son Mika – recreated using a combination of high-definition, trompe-l’oeil printing, expressive embroidery, and intentionally visible hand-stitching.
Long interested in female identity and its suppressed role in the Western canon, Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz chose to transfer her characteristically striking and surrealist 2021 work Ginger Locks to a Capucines using a high-definition print, set off by a string of golden pearls.
American artist Liza Lou is perhaps best-known for her use of beads in both large-scale sculptures such as Kitchen (1995) – and more intimate artworks; for her Artycapucines, that subtle and beautifully textural bead work is embossed into soft leather, which is then delicately printed in pastel colours and draped around the Capucines bag like a sculptural second skin.
Franco-Serbian artistic duo Tursic & Mille bring their interest in image overload in contemporary society and recontextualization to their Capucines, and reinvent the bag in a signature flower shape that is then used as a frame for a richly embroidered and coloured version of their 2021 painting Tenderness, accompanied by a charred cedarwood handle and inlaid LV logo.
Chinese artist Ziping Wang’s mini Artycapucines is the smallest bag in the collection so far; a delightful confection of leather patchwork and marquetry in bright vivid colors and candy-sweet motifs, and a powerful comment on our visually saturated and self-reflexive world.
The Artycapucines Collection today contains. 29 distinctive designs by celebrated artists from across the world including Alex Israel, Beatriz Milhazes, Daniel Buren, Henry Taylor, Paola Pivi, Park Seo-Bo, Tschabalala Self, Ugo Rondinone, Urs Fischer, Vik Muniz and Zhao Zhao. Each special bag is further proof of how for over a century Louis Vuitton has continuously placed its innovative spirit and artisanal expertise at the service of artists and their creativity, from Louis Vuitton’s grandson Gaston-Louis commissioning work back in the 1920s to collaborations with legends such as Sol LeWitt, Yayoi Kusama, Richard Prince, and Takashi Murakami, to the opening of the Frank Gehry-designed Fondation Vuitton in 201 4. The Artycapucines Collection reveals the quintessence of that commitment to artistic creativity, savoir-faire and craft, while affirming the Capucines as the ultimate expression of femininity.
All bags in the 2023 Artycapucines Collection, presented in specially designed boxes, will be available in limited editions of 200, revealed worldwide on 12th October 2023.
