‘A monumental marriage between art and business,’ is how the designer Marc Jacobs, then the creative director of Louis Vuitton’s womenswear line, would describe the collaboration between the behemoth of Parisian luxury and Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Debuting as part of Jacobs’ S/S 2003 collection for the house, Murakami’s multi-coloured reimagining of the Louis Vuitton monogrammed handbag – most memorably on white canvas – would become the it-bag for the it-girls du jour (and has had something of a renaissance in recent years on resale sites due to fashion’s fascination with all things 2000s).
A slew of Murakami collabs would follow – his playful cherry and flower motifs would appear across the house’s leather goods throughout the 2000s – running until 2015, a year after Jacobs exited the label, replaced by current artistic director Nicolas Ghesquière. The influence of the partnership was immense: not only did it rack up hundreds of thousands of handbag sales for Louis Vuitton, it would also spawn the phenomenon of the art-fashion collaboration, one which shows no signs of abating today (at Louis Vuitton alone, since 2003 the house has collaborated with Richard Prince, Yayoi Kusama, Cindy Sherman, Marc Newson and Jeff Koons, among others).
