Inspired by the sinuous forms of some of Frank Gehry’s iconic buildings, The Louis Vuitton x Frank Gehry limited edition collection was unveiled at Art Basel Miami during Miami Art Week 2023. The Pritzker Prize winning architect reinterpreted the Maison’s famous Capucine bag for the art festival, which was originally designed by LV’s creative director, Nicolas Ghesquière. This collection extends the wide-ranging collaboration between the Canadian-American architect and the Parisian fashion atelier. It was part of the display by Louis Vuitton at the annual art festival, in a spatial installation that reflected Gehry’s trademark aesthetic and formal experiments.

The installation was organised into four themes–Architecture and Form, Material Exploration, Animals, and his Twisted Box creation for “Celebrating Monogram”—and included handbags, trunks, perfume bottles, original artworks, preparatory sketches, and architectural models. The display and the collaboration between the architect—known for his curvilinear forms—and the fashion design atelier known for their craftsmanship highlights the emblematic relationship between fashion and architecture. While architecture and fashion design seem like unlikely collaborators, both have a lot of similarities. The primary concern for both is comfort for the human body through proportion, scale, and material. One constructs a building just as one constructs a garment.

Moreover, many fashion designers have notably taken inspiration from architecture, such as Hussein Chalayan and Rei Kawakubo. In the past as well, Zaha Hadid has collaborated with Pharrell Williams to design sneakers for Adidas, and Gehry himself has worked with LV on the design of not just retail spaces and installations but perfume bottles. The collaboration between the two began in 2015 when Gehry was commissioned to design the Fondation Louis Vuitton building in Paris. For this particular collection, Gehry based his designs around three key themes–Architecture and Form, Material Exploration, and Animals. Each bag of the 10-bag collection exemplifies the coming together of his design prowess and Louis Vuitton’s attention to craft.

Architecture and Form

Three bags from the exclusive collection reference buildings designed by Gehry during his illustrious career: The Capucines MM Concrete Pockets, Capucines BB Analog Bag, and the Capucines BB Shimmer Haze, while the Twisted Box is a reimagining of a bag designed by Gehry for LV in 2014 for “Celebrating Monogram” on the occasion of the atelier’s 160^th anniversary. The Capucines MM Concrete Pockets takes as its inspiration Gehry’s iconic fluid style as seen in his designs for Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and the celebrated Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles. Using a 3D screen-printing treatment to recreate his buildings’ concrete textures, the bag features an LV logo specially designed by the architect. The Capucines BB Analog Bag pays homage to the angled façade design of the IAC Building in New York. On the other hand, exploring the malleability of form apparent in Gehry’s work, the Twisted Box bag which is part of this collection is reinterpreted in two versions in black and silver.

Material exploration

Other bags from the collection reference Gehry’s experimentation with the possibilities of material. The Capucines Mini Blossom for instance is a tribute to the Les Extraits perfume bottles that Frank Gehry designed for Louis Vuitton in 2021. Reworked here as majestic giant petals in translucent resin, they seem to explode in a multicoloured cloud onto the Capucines Mini. The bag’s logo recalls the giant LV that Gehry created to sit over the entrance of the Fondation Louis Vuitton. The Capucines Mini Puzzle also references floral design, calling to mind a hydrangea in bloom with its individually shaped interlocking petals in hand-painted aquarelle print. While the Capucines BB Shimmer Haze which takes as its starting point the vibrant facade of the Museum of Pop Culture (formerly EMP Museum) in Seattle, its six panels of transparent Plexiglas, held together with Monogram flower rivets speak to its innovation with material.

Animals

Frank Gehry’s buildings have often been compared to animals with the Guggenheim Bilbao famously likened to a whale. The architect has previously talked about his fascination with the piscine form, specifically the carp being a recurring motif in his work. This is expressed in the collection through the Capucines MM Floating Fish and the Capucines Mini Drawn Fish. The Capucines MM Floating Fish draws on the piscine light fixtures that Gehry designed for the Fondation Louis Vuitton, with a bright red adorning the smooth white leather of the handbag. The Capucines Mini Drawn Fish similarly highlights this fascination with a distinctive sketch of a fish by the architect faithfully reproduced in delicate black and the flap covered in a pattern of Frank Gehry-drawn fish scales.

The sometimes controversial architect also created sculptures and installations inspired by animal forms which find reference in two bags, the Capucines BB Croc and the Bear With Us Clutch. The BB Croc is inspired by the crocodile sculpture he created for Sexy Fish, a restaurant in London. The original artwork becomes the bag’s handle: a highly sculptural, black-toned brass crocodile. The Bear With Us clutch is an ode to Frank Gehry’s 2014 life-size sculpture Bear with Us, with a body made of brass with a ruthenium finish whose folds and forms mirror the original sculpture.

Other highlights of the LV display at the art festival in Miami include A Tea Party for Louis Trunk, which was Gehry’s exclusive creation for the 200 Trunks, 200 Visionaries exhibition celebrating French designer Louis Vuitton’s 200^th birthday. Other projects and artworks on display that mark the collaboration between architect and fashion house include his Les Extraits perfume bottles, as well as a selection of sketches and models, such as preparatory drawings for his work on the “Celebrating Monogram” project, and maquettes exploring his design for the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris. On designing the new collection, the 94-year-old architect commented, "It's not something I usually do – handbags – so it's a search for ideas. Every creative person goes through that, it's very similar to making a movie, shooting a rocket to the moon."