Bags Of Art

Using five of the world’s most famous masterpieces, American pop culture icon JEFF KOONS has transformed already desirable handbags into modern works of art

- Clare Coulson and Emmanuelle Ducournau

When Gaston-Louis Vuitton invited artists to display their work in the windows of his family’s Paris store in the 1920s, he probably didn’t imagine that, a century on, the luxury powerhouse would still have contemporary art at the heart of its designs. Over the years, Louis Vuitton has collaborated with artists such as Stephen Sprouse, Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince to offer new ways for the public to experience the arts.

The latest artist to work with the luxury fashion brand is Jeff Koons, who launched a collection of five bags and accessories in April that are as ambitious as his pop-culture sculptures. He says he wanted ‘to create a series of bags that could communicate an idea and have a profoundness about them’.

Jeff, 62, who is worth an estimated $1 billion (about R13.5 billion) is the mastermind behind iconic works including a life-sized porcelain sculpture of Michael Jackson and his pet chimpanzee Bubbles, and Balloon Dog, a three-metre-tall, orange, high-shine steel dog that sold for $58 million (about R760 million) in 2013, at the time the highest sum paid for a living artist’s work.

In Masters x Louis Vuitton x Jeff Koons*, the American artist has turned to his 2015 Gazing Ball series, in which he recreated 36 of the most famous works in art history and placed a reflective gazing ball in front of them. Louis Vuitton and Koons have persuaded the keepers of the world’s most prized artworks – by Titian, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter Paul Rubens, Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Vincent van Gogh – to allow the paintings to be reproduced on the brand’s most iconic bags, including the ‘Speedy’, the ‘Keepall’ and the ‘Neverfull’.