The Art Of Accessories
Marie Claire - UK|June 2017

Louis Vuitton’s latest collaboration with American pop culture icon Jeff Koons brings together five of the world’s most famous old masters for a totally new take on artistry.

Clare Coulson
The Art Of Accessories

When Gaston-Louis Vuitton invited artists to display their work in the windows of his family’s Paris store in the 20s, he probably didn’t imagine that, a century on, the luxury powerhouse would still be putting contemporary art at the heart of its designs.

The latest artist to join a long and storied list of collaborators is Jeff Koons, who this month launches a collection of five bags that are as ambitious as his towering, flawlessly constructed pop-culture sculptures.

Koons, 62, who is worth an estimated $1 billion (about £801 million), is the mastermind behind iconic works including a life-size porcelain sculpture of Michael Jackson and Bubbles, and Balloon Dog – a 10ft high orange highshine steel dog that sold for $58 million (about £46.5 million) in 2013, 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 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. Over two years, 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 their paintings to be reproduced on the brand’s most iconic bags, including the ‘Speedy’, the ‘Keepall’ and the ‘Neverfull’.

This story is from the June 2017 edition of Marie Claire - UK.

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This story is from the June 2017 edition of Marie Claire - UK.

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