Louis Vuitton Marks Founder's 200th Birthday In A Big Way
There are contributions from BTS to game developers too.
Louis Vuitton is marking Leo season in an extra special way this year. To commemorate the 200th birthday anniversary of its namesake founder which falls on August 4, the maison has embarked on a series of creative tributes for the rest of the year through an initiative it dubs Louis 200.
A trunk designed by BTS that will make an appearance in the windows of Louis Vuitton stores.
The activation which kicked off on August 4 also sees the maison teaming up with an exciting roll call of 200 talents, special friends and visionaries around the world that include brand ambassadors BTS, an NFT artist and game developers.
To mark the occasion, the Louis Vuitton Marina Bay Sands Island Maison at Marina Bay Sands has sported a special look: a Damier check-inspired motif swathing the facade with a larger-than-life portrait of Louis Vuitton rendered in checkered pixels. Other stores which have received the same treatment include the Fifth Avenue flagship and the Shibuya store in Tokyo.
Like the Louis Vuitton Marina Bay Sands Island store in Marina Bay Sands, the Fifth Avenue flagship in New York City is also dressed up in a celebratory facade design.
Ahead, we look in the detail, the different ways the brand is feting the bicentennial of the man known for being an adventurer, designer, innovator and entrepreneur and reimagining luxury travel.
From August 4, download 'Louis: The Game' from Apple App Store or Google Play and play an interactive game starring the house mascot Vivienne. Developed by the same folks behind 'League of Legends', the game sees Vivienne traversing different locales inspired by Paris, Beijing and London to reach a festive birthday destination while collecting items to progress to new levels along the way.
The game boasts crypto elements too in the form of NFT artworks as part of a collaboration with digital artist Beeple. The latter's record-smashing artwork Everydays: The First 500 Days fetched US$69.3 million (S$93.45 million) at a Christie’s online auction this March.
To tie in with the "200" theme, Louis Vuitton has roped in 200 talents from the worlds of art, architecture and design to interpret the iconic LV trunk for its window displays. Each of these creatives have been given the opportunity to add their own spin to a 50cm x 50cm x 100cm, said to be the dimensions of the original trunk Vuitton created in the 1850s.
Among those involved are long-term collaborators Alex Israel and Stephen Sprouse, who had worked on the brand's perfumes and ready-to-wear collections respectively. Other names include the architect Peter Marino who designed a harness-bound trunk and K-pop idols and brand ambassadors BTS who decorated their designs with cutesy doodles of whales and hearts among others.
Louis Vuitton is unveiling three different windows formats for 460 of its stores around the world, including the one in Place Vendome (pictured) and Shanghai's Plaza 66.
One format features the screen-panelled trunk (see Point 2) floating in mid-air, displaying the creations as an ongoing video loop. The other format features gigantic robot-like figures (pictured) composed of boxes – a tribute to the way Monsieur Vuitton would stack trunks in his windows.
Lastly, some stores will feature a window installation made with three-dimensional cubes to mimic Louis Vuitton's signature Damier checks. Every cube is composed of 200 sheets of paper, with each paper printed with an image or artwork of one of the 200 trunk designs made in collaboration with the various artists the brand has tapped. Twice a day, a layer will be peeled away – much like an old-school calendar – to reveal a new artwork. The torn sheets of paper will be reused as packaging or shared with customers.
Louis Vuitton's life story from his early days from the time he left his hometown of Anchay for Paris at the age of 14 to becoming the appointed trunk maker of Empress Eugenie to revolutionising trunk designs with a waterproof coated canvas have all been well documented. Now, get ready for a fresh retelling of that narrative.
French author Caroline Bongrand has created a fictionalised novel of the Vuitton story (pictured) which will be published in French and English in October. To complement the book, the maison will also debut Looking for Louis, a documentary that retraces the life of the young Vuitton which will be streamed on Apple TV+ later in the year.
Alex Katz, who is known for brightly coloured figurative paintings done in that trademark two-dimensional style, will be creating a large-scale triptych of Louis Vuitton. For an indication of what you can expect, just refer to an earlier piece of the young Vuitton which he did from 2017 (pictured) that was displayed at the Legende: Louis Vuitton X exhibition in Beverly Hills in 2019.