Louis Vuitton Toasts Richard Prince

By PIA CATTON
January 8, 2008

There will be a heady mix of popular culture, modern art, luxury, and society at the Guggenheim Museum tonight. Louis Vuitton is hosting a party that serves as a bookend to the exhibit "Richard Prince: Spiritual America" and offers a sneak peek at the luxury brand's spring/summer 2008 accessories. At the party, between 20 and 25 new handbags — designed by Marc Jacobs in collaboration with Mr. Prince — will be presented to the public for the first time since they were shown on the runway in Paris.

"For us, the timing couldn't be better," the president and CEO of Louis Vuitton North America, Daniel Lalonde, said. "On the last day of the exhibit, we will be showing the product for the first time. And we're taking pre-orders for them."

Mr. Prince is well-known for appropriating popular culture — such as advertisement photographs of the Marlboro Man — into his paintings. For his work with Louis Vuitton, Mr. Prince created splashy, colorful handbags, some of which include the LV logo silk-screened on canvas along with vaudeville-style jokes: "I've been married for thirty years and I'm still in love with the same woman. If my wife ever finds out, she'll kill me." On others, cartoons created by Mr. Prince were hand-embroidered on bold, colorful bags. At the Guggenheim party, several of the bags will be carried by models dressed to resemble the women in Mr. Prince's "Nurse" paintings. These sexy women in white were inspired by drawings on the covers of pulp fiction novels — and the Paris runway show in October opened with a group of supermodels dressed as these nurses.

The Prince–Jacobs collaboration continues the brand's effort to crisscross the boundaries of fashion and art. "It's been part of the DNA of Louis Vuitton for some time," Mr. Lalonde said.

Its collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami led to a series of handbags that reinvented the classic LV monogrammed canvas; some of them are on view and for sale in Los Angeles at the fully operational Louis Vuitton boutique within the Museum of Contemporary Art's exhibit of Mr. Murakami's work. Louis Vuitton has also invited artists Olafur Eliasson, Stephen Sprouse, and Robert Wilson to work on projects in the past.