Louis Vuitton teams up with star architect Frank Gehry for handbag collection

Louis Vuitton continues to collaborate with Frank Gehry. At the Art Basel Miami Beach contemporary art fair, ​​the LVMH group’s leading label has presented a capsule collection of handbags designed by renowned US-Canadian architect Frank Gehry, the brains behind the building of the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.
 

Louis Vuitton has taken part for the second consecutive year in the art event, held on December 8-10 in Miami, Florida. The label is one of the fair’s global partners, and is present at the fair’s 21st edition with a stand showcasing its long-standing collaboration with Gehry, who also designed in 2014 the shop windows of the label’s Parisian stores, as well as the Twisted Box handbag.

The latter is one of the four themes of the Louis Vuitton stand (the others being architecture and form, materials exploration, and animals), which showcases a range of trunks, perfume bottles, original artworks, sketches, architectural models and handbags, all of them created by Gehry.

The architect, 94, is renowned for the organic aesthetic of his imposing, destructured buildings, and is still brimming with creative energy. He has designed among others the Cinémathèque Française film archives in Paris, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, and the spectacular Luma Tower in Arles, France, in 2021.

The limited-edition collection consists of a dozen models, some of them inspired by Gehry’s most famous projects, like the clutch replica of his Bear With Us sculpture. The focus is on craftsmanship and unique materials, as shown by the Capucines MM Concrete Pockets bag, whose calfskin outer structure is made with an innovative embossed screen-printing method replicating the different textures of the concrete used in some of Gehry’s buildings.

Louis Vuitton has presented in Miami other works developed by Gehry for the label, like the sculptural trunk A Tea Party for Louis, designed for the 200 Malles, 200 Visionnaires exhibition celebrating the 200th anniversary of Louis Vuitton’s birth. Also, the perfume bottles of the Les Extraits scents, and the preparatory models for the Louis Vuitton Foundation building in Paris.

Louis Vuitton has enjoyed a close relationship with the art world for many years, having collaborated with contemporary art giants like Sol LeWitt, James Rosenquist, César and Olafur Eliasson. Defined as “a creative cultural company” by LVMH’s boss Bernard Arnault, over the years Louis Vuitton has tasked many other artists with reinventing its renowned monogram handbags, like Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama and Stephen Sprouse.