The Complete Backstory of the Louis Vuitton x Murakami Collection

In 2003, before Phoebe Philo became a fashion deity, Hedi Slimane turned to womenswear, and The Row redefined haute minimalism, there was one designer whose ability to read the culture stood out like a diamond tiara at a stoop sale: Marc Jacobs.

Jacobs was then six years into his role as artistic director at Louis Vuitton. If any uncertainty lingered that an American enfant terrible—Jacobs had been fired from Perry Ellis for designing his now beloved “Grunge” collection—was qualified to steer one of France’s premier leather goods brands to global dominance, it was put to rest that spring with the release of Jacobs’s partnership with the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. Louis Vuitton x Murakami is regarded as the defining fashion collaboration of the early aughts, and it remained in production, with variations added periodically, until Jacobs left the brand, in 2014. Louis Vuitton is now marking that tipping point in its history by re-releasing both the original Jacobs-approved bags and a whole new slew of Murakami-fied wares, including belts, sneakers, silk scarves, wallets, sunglasses, and a made-to-order Malle Wardrobe that comes stocked with 33 Speedy bags.

Jacobs, a serious collector of contemporary art, had partnered with artists prior to 2003. He had launched a graffiti-themed range with Stephen Sprouse in 2001 and a patchwork one with Julie Verhoeven in 2002. Sprouse and Verhoeven had put their mark on the surface of the brown and gold LV monogram, one of the most recognizable in the world, but they had left the substrate, so to speak, intact. Murakami, on the other hand, reimagined the formerly inviolable with stylized flowers in candy colors on stark white and black fields. Drawing on influences such as manga and traditional Japanese family crests—the latter had informed the original Vuitton design, which was created during the late-Victorian craze for japonisme—the collection also included his Eye Love Monogram and Monogram Cherry Blossom; subsequent ones unveiled the Monogram Cerises and the Monogramouflage.

As Jacobs had intuited, Murakami’s irreverent tinkering was exactly what Louis Vuitton had been lacking for cool-kid approval. In Paris, the limited-edition collection sold out in hours; in New York, a 7,000-name waiting list bloomed. On eBay, resellers were commanding twice the roughly $2,000 that Vuitton stores were charging. Those unwilling to wait or pay scalpers’ prices went to Canal Street in lower Manhattan, where knockoffs abounded. Paris Hilton, Naomi Campbell, Jessica Simpson, and Madonna all had Murakami bags, as did the fictional Regina George, the Queen of the Plastics in Mean Girls.

“The timing of it all really worked out to my advantage, so ultimately I feel I was lucky,” said Murakami recently. The experiment raised the artist’s profile considerably: Four years after the collaboration, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles organized a traveling Murakami retrospective that included a stop at the Brooklyn Museum. Jacobs, for his part, reserved his most insightful comment for the Bilbao portion of the tour. “It has been, and continues to be, a monumental marriage of art and commerce,” he said then. “The ultimate crossover—one for both the fashion and art history books.”

Collage credits, clockwise from top left: ©︎2003 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved; Photo by Angelica Blechschmidt, courtesy of the Estate of Angelica Blechschmidt; ©︎2003 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved; SplashNews. Center: Courtesy of Louis Vuitton.