I always thought that Louis Vuitton’s Capucines bag was named after the French actress Capucine, since she too was known for her structured silhouette. But no. It is named after Louis Vuitton’s very first store, which opened in 1854 on Rue Neuve-des-Capucines in Paris. Most recently, it has served as the blank canvas for an array of artists in Louis Vuitton’s series known as Artycapucines, which has been carefully curated for a select number of Vuitton customers; each bag in the third Artycapucines Collection will be available in a limited edition of 200 and released in stores worldwide at the end of October. The first two iterations included bags created by— among others—artists Henry Taylor, Beatriz Milhazes, Urs Fischer, Zhao Zhao, Jean-Michel Othoniel, and Tschabalala Self. This latest iteration will include six international artists: Gregor Hildebrandt, Donna Huanca, Huang Yuxing, Vik Muniz, Paola Pivi, and Zeng Fanzhi.
“I think an art collection is a lot like a diary,” Delphine Arnault, executive vice president of Louis Vuitton once said in an interview. “Your tastes evolve with time. I try never to sell anything because it’s part of my journey.” But selling is also a part of her journey, of course, so she has found a way with Artycapucines to combine her love of art with her talent for commerce.
“Fashion is not art,” Comme des Garçons’ Rei Kawakubo has claimed. “The aims of fashion and art are different and there is no need to compare them.” But Delphine Arnault and Vuitton are not comparing. They are pairing, and it is in that juxtaposition of fashion and art—a kind of tautology of which-is-which when they are layered (yes) tautly together with a romantic’s notion of innateness—that can result in a resounding aesthetic success and thus a commercial one.
There have been many such combinations. 1949’s “Miss Dior” dress and the floral patterns of Monet. Yves Saint Laurent’s 1965 Mondrian collection. Gianni Versace’s 1991 “Warhol Marilyn” gown. Valentino’s Spring/Summer 2017 collection, for which designer Pierpaolo Piccioli welcomed guest designer Zandra Rhodes to his runway, and together they elicited inspirations from the images of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Elsa Schiaparelli and Salvador Dalí formed the most famous designer/artist layering: whether it be the “Tear-Illusion Dress” within her Circus collection of 1938, or the infamous “Lobster Dress” in 1937, for which the lobster art was printed onto the silk organza dress by master silk designer Sache, or the 1935 “Telephone Compact,” or when their collaboration reached a crowning moment of Surrealist absurdity in the “High-Heeled Hat” from Schiap’s Winter 1937-1938 collection, which was inspired by a photograph by Dali’s wife, Gala, of him wearing a shoe on his head. According to the Metropolitan Museum’s description, the hat “was made to wear with a black dress and jacket embroidered with red lips, which were suggestive of those belonging to the voluptuous actress Mae West ([or whom Schiaparelli was designing movie costumes at the time].”
The first person at Vuitton who started working with artists and layering their work into the company’s luxurious needs was Gaston-Louis, the grandson of the company’s founder and eldest son of George, Louis’ heir. Gaston-Louis was the last of the Vuitton men to run the company, helming it from 1920 until his death in 1970. At the turn of the 20th century, Gaston-Louis Vuitton, staking his own early innately romantic influence within the company, commissioned different artists to design perfume bottles, advertising campaigns, and window displays. An avid collector with a childlike enthusiasm for discovery and acquisition, he was known for his refined tastes and was often described in writings of the time as an aesthete. In 1922, he commissioned the artist Camille Cless-Brothier to design an enameled crystal perfume bottle he named “L’Arbre pleureur.” He was also a member of the Société des Artistes Indépendants, which led to collaborations with lesser-known artists. André Ballet, who configured book plates, designed other crystal bottles. African-inspired ivory knobs for the company’s walking sticks were designed by Roger Foy, brother of the illustrator André Foy, and Gaston Le Bourgeois, best known as an Art Deco sculptor, painted panels for the London store on Oxford Street.
In 1925, Gaston-Louis wrote an essay for a publication called Vendre about his love of window display, which he considered in many ways his own brand-new art form. “The art of creating a window display falls both within a sharp sense of architecture and the skills of a stage director,” he wrote. “The picturesque streets of the older days with their curious boutiques are now gone forever. While the 19th century street was quite dull, a wind of change seems to be blowing in this new century: the shopkeeper transforms his front window into a magnificent and modern façade. Let’s turn the street into a cheerful space. By our daily renewed efforts let’s draw the passer-by, let’s give him a reason to dawdle, to stroll!”
A reason to dawdle cheerfully and with intent could be the mission statement of any curator with a sense of commerce. Ultimately, a designer brand commissions an artist because to dawdle over unexpected, juxtaposed beauty—to concentrate on its subtle craftsmanship and the profound care put into its creation with the finest of materials—is what leads to covetous desire.
There is certainly a cheerfulness to the Artycapucines Collection that mirrors Gaston-Louis’ childlike enthusiasm for art and collecting. Delphine Arnault, in fact, told the art journal Gagosian Quarterly that her 4-year-old son’s favorite bag from the first Artycapucines series was by artist Alex Israel and that he loved the one by Jean-Michel Othonielfrom the second iteration, since each sparked his own innocent wonder for beauty and art. As carefully constructed as art and fashion can be, they each often leave their seams of cynicism showing. But that is the loveliest aspect of the three Artycapucines series so far: their seeming (seaming?) lack of cynicism. These artful miniatures are little manifestations of joy—and that is justification enough for their creation. Art doesn’t haven’t to be so serious. (And neither does design.)
Or, as Robert Smith of the Cure said, “You don’t always have to sing dark things to be thoughtful.” I thought of Smith’s proclamation when speaking with one of the artists in the third installment of the Artycapucines series.
Gregor Hildebrandt harkened back to his own childhood when divulging what inspires him. “My other great love is music,” he told Grazia USA. That was no surprise, actually, based on his use of deconstructed music cassettes and vinyl records and compact discs—the visual aspects of sound recording—for his own “latently romantic” layering of different elements in his process (to use the descriptive terminology of the Perrotin Gallery’s New York branch, where his work is shown here in the States).
“Initially as a kid, I listened to my uncle’s record collection: Peter Gabriel, Neil Young, Jacques Brel,” Hildebrandt continued. “And then in my youth, I discovered the Sex Pistols, and later the Cure.”
Based in Berlin, Hildebrandt appropriates technological conduits of aural forms of art to create a kind of invisible painting. It hovers in the air between his work and his viewers by virtue of his playful approach, which is cerebral but not brainy, bristling as it is with tactility. There is a teasing aspect of the work that even borders on being taunted. Still, it is all done in a good-natured way, which results in the denatured art that seems to be his goal. Playing with perception—rending silence from materials made to render sound—is, to me, his most important impetus. There is a German term, Gesamtkunstwerk, which keeps coming up when I think of him; it roughly translates as a “total work of art” and describes a creative process in which different art forms are combined to create a single cohesive whole.
Hildebrandt himself explains: “Having studied art in Mainz, I moved to Berlin in the mid-1990s and around this time I started thinking about how to integrate music physically into my painting work. The Einstürzende Neubauten song called “Falschgeld” [“Fake Money”] perfectly encapsulated what I wanted to say, so I took the physical audio cassette tape of the song and glued it into my drawing book. This metamorphosis of bringing music into painting led me to start working with different types of analog audio and visual materials, such as vinyl and VHS tape, which I incorporate into paintings and installation works.”
Another of the artists in the third iteration of Artycapucines, Huang Yuxing, coincidentally invoked his childhood as well when speaking to Grazia USA about his involvement with Vuitton: “I was born and raised in Beijing. I have been studying Chinese painting and have trained in its skills and techniques ever since kindergarten,” he said.
There is a punctiliousness to his paintings, a meticulousness to each of his brushstrokes, and an intensity to his colors. All of this is grounded in “Gongbai Zhongcai,” the traditional Chinese realist technique. Again, a layering is highlighted as his canvasses carefully preserve the process of their own creation. Not only colors and his brushstrokes, but also the outlines of the artist’s own hand live on within his canvases after being overlaid over and over and over. Again, he recalls the wonder and awe of his own youth: “I happened upon Les Demoiselles d’Avignon by Picasso in a primary-school art book and during my highschool years and, later at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, I also systematically studied Western painting and art history.” A resultant homage to Expressionism can be discerned in Huang Yuxing’s singular vision, which is evidenced in the play of color on his Artycapucines bag.
Vik Muniz, another of the artists in this third iteration of the series, sums up much of what the series itself is getting at with its interfacing of art and fashion. “As a student,” says Muniz, “I was interested in experimental psychology: How do we see perspective and color? How do we apprehend the space around us? For me, art is the evolution of the interface between mind and matter, between consciousness and phenomenon.” Muniz was born in São Paulo,Brazil, but lives and works now in both New York City and Rio de Janeiro. He is known for the complexity—the, yes, layering again—of his photographic works. He utilizes an array of found materials—chocolate, jelly, toys, and many diverse and quite dirtied-up elements of detritus—to recreate iconic works of art and scenes from popular culture, which he then photographs.
There is a high—even highfalutin’—irony to Muniz’s now being featured on such a luxuriously designed object as a Capucines bag. But maybe that is what the layering of fashion and art finally is: the highest form of irony, which in itself is artful. It took the inspired curatorial eye of Delphine Arnault with the artistic heritage of Louis Vuitton behind her to realize that a plinth could not only be accessed for art, but it could also be accessorized.
