The LVMH group is betting again on Takashi Murakami with a new capsule collection scheduled for January 2025. A disillusioned aspiring mangaka, the Japanese designer has not only become a fixture in art galleries the world over. In 2003, he introduced the very first collaborations combining luxury and contemporary art. Today, the Japanese designer is making a comeback with the Number One in luxury, with trunk-maker Louis Vuitton of course, but also watchmaker Hublot.
Singer Philippe Katerine’s cutesy attitude is no laughing matter: the Japanese artist with the smiling flowers and pioneer of artistic collaborations in luxury, Takashi Murakami, is back, 21 years after his first coup with Louis Vuitton in the Marc Jacobs era.
This capsule event with the Japanese artist, scheduled for January 2025, was announced by a post on the luxury brand’s instagram account, as well as by the transfer to Paris of one of his works, usually exhibited in Kyoto: the gilded statue The flower parent and the child. Themonumental work, whose base is…a Louis Vuitton monogrammed trunk, has been installed opposite the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, in the heart of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, owned by the 75-brand luxury group.
This announcement comes a month after the closing of its dedicated exhibition at Galerie Perrotin.
Between Kawaii culture and Y2K nostalgia
A return to childhood seems to be the key trend for 2024, with Louis Vuitton once again calling on Takashi Murakami. The 62-year-old artist is one of the leading exponents of kawaii culture, a Japanese word for anything cute, and by extension, anything to do with Japanese pop culture. This culture took off in Europe at the end of the 1970s, before accelerating sharply in the 1980s.
Next January, the trunk-maker plans to reissue the flagship models created by the Japanese artist and which left their mark on the aesthetics of the 2000s (the laughing noughties or Y2K), a period fantasized about – in the same way as the 1990s – by Gen Z.
In 2004, the Japanese designer landed at Louis Vuitton, on the advice of American Marc Jacobs, then artistic director of the LVMH powerhouse for seven years.
Takashi Murakami had just created his deceptively naive emblem of smiling flowers. “It was time to do something radically new,” said Marc Jacobs in an interview. “We wanted to integrate art with fashion in a way that had never been done before.”
Read also > [CHRONICLE] Are luxury brands killing subcultures?
Featured Photo: © Louis Vuitton
