Takashi Murakami’s latest collaboration with Louis Vuitton transforms the Capucines bag and takes over Art Basel Paris with surreal color and scale.
Summary
- The seventh Artycapucines Collection features 11 new Capucines bags reimagined by Takashi Murakami.
- Each design channels Murakami’s signature icons through Louis Vuitton’s technical mastery.
- The launch at Art Basel Paris includes a monumental installation featuring an eight-metre octopus sculpture.
Louis Vuitton’s Artycapucines series has always turned the Capucines bag into a blank space for artists to experiment. For its seventh chapter, the house collaborates with Takashi Murakami, the Tokyo-born artist known for merging pop, anime, and fine art into one hyper-color world. Nearly two decades after their first collaboration, Murakami returns with eleven new interpretations of the Capucines, each designed as a collectible work that bridges craftsmanship and fantasy.
Working closely with the Louis Vuitton design team, Murakami treated the bag as both object and sculpture. His recurring motifs such as the smiling flower, the panda, the mushroom, and the multicolor monogram appear in vivid forms. The Capucines East West Rainbow reshapes the bag into his flower motif, while the Mini Mushroom is covered in a forest of 3D-printed mushrooms, each hand-embroidered on mirrored leather. The Mini Tentacle transforms his character Mr. DOB into an octopus, and the Dragon bag Best Replica Knockofftes his 18-metre painting Dragon in Clouds Indigo Blue with astonishing precision. The Panda Clutch, cast in silver-tone brass and set with more than six thousand crystals, feels closer to a museum piece than a purse.
The Artycapucines project has, since 2019, united artists like Henry Taylor, Paola Pivi, Vik Muniz, and Beatriz Milhazes with Louis Vuitton’s atelier. Murakami’s turn underscores the strength of that partnership, which began with his 2003 redesign of the monogram canvas and helped usher art deeper into the vocabulary of fashion.
To celebrate the release, Louis Vuitton staged an immersive installation at the Grand Palais for Art Basel Paris. Murakami transformed the Balcon d’Honneur into his own universe, centering an eight-metre-tall octopus inspired by Chinese lanterns. The space was covered in carpeting printed with its tentacles, while the creature’s glowing head displayed his Jellyfish Eyes motif from 2001. The scene was both theatrical and intimate, recalling Murakami’s ability to turn fear into play.
Inside the tentacles, the eleven Artycapucines bags were displayed alongside his spherical Plush Balls, soft sculptures developed since 1995 that surround viewers in a kaleidoscopic field of color. The Capucines BB Golden Garden, Capusplit BB, and Mini Autograph sat near a new Cherry Blossom Plush Ball created for the exhibition, while the Capucines Mini Tentacle and MM Eye mirrored the central octopus’s features. The XXL Camo and East West Dragon referenced his earlier TIME and Dragon in Clouds works, drawing a clear line between his art and Vuitton’s craft.
This exhibition also extends a long-standing dialogue between Louis Vuitton and contemporary art. From Gaston-Louis Vuitton’s artist commissions in the 1920s to collaborations with Sol LeWitt, Richard Prince, and Yayoi Kusama, the house’s partnerships continue to expand the language of luxury. Murakami’s installation at Art Basel Paris is not just a presentation of handbags but a continuation of a story that started on the runway in 2003 and has grown into an ongoing conversation about creativity, scale, and craftsmanship.
The Artycapucines VII Collection will be available in limited numbers following its global reveal on October 21 at Art Basel Paris.
