Louis Vuitton invited five leading contemporary artists for this year’s reimagination of the charismatic Capucines bag, exclusively available in limited editions of 200.
Out of the five collaborators, Chinese artist Ziping Wang’s playful spin is the smallest ArtyCapucines ever to be created. Affectionately nicknamed Sweet Tooth, the charming confection of leather patchwork and marquetry has a candy cane-like handle that matches the bag’s candy-shaped feet. An enamel gingerbread man wearing Monogram flower buttons graces the bag’s flap that imitates melting ice cream. The interior is just as exciting, with a reverse print of the exterior and a removable printed mirror resembling a slice of caramel apple.
The icing on the cake? Two double-sided “sticky notes” in leather with the artist’s drawings that can be affixed on the ArtyCapucines’ exterior with a red-capped sewing push pin attachment.
A sentimental pull elevates Malawian artist Billie Zangewa’s ArtyCapucines, which depicts her work The Swimming Lesson featuring her son, Mika. First presented in 2020 as a hand-stitched silk patchwork, the swimming pool and Mika are now rendered in various embroidery techniques with light-catching metallic threads. Beads evoke sparkling water reflections while blue raw silk was chosen for the bag’s lining to match the pool.
The bag comes with three charms of African penguins dressed with Monogram flowers on their bodies, a sweet allusion to how Zangewa bonds with her son by exchanging figurines. And, in an ArtyCapucines first, a reversed Monogram flower adorns the flap.
Likewise, duo Tursic & Mille’s ArtyCapucines features their 2021 painting Tenderness but what is striking are the two flower-shaped panels – usually seen on the Franco-Serbian artists’ canvases – that transform the Capucines’ usual trapezium silhouette. Creating the resulting indent in the bag’s base required specific skills that were unprecedented for the Capucines.
A reflection of the timber supports on the duo’s canvases, charred cedarweed is chosen for the arched handle, the inlay of the metal LV logo, and the feet of the bag. A playful embroidered cartoon dinosaur, first seen on their 2022 work The Souvenir with Dinosaur and Owl, adds a surprise twist underneath the bag’s flap, while Wilfried Mille’s discarded cigarette filter is immortalised as a golden zip pull. In what seems to be a cheeky expression from the artists, the leather lining is decorated with painted coral-bell flowers, also known as désepoir du pientre, or “painter’s despair”.
