Louis Vuitton brings back its iconic Takashi Murakami collection
Ten years after being discontinued, the collaboration is back and better than ever
Pop-up store and gallery with Louis Vuitton x Murakami items in Tokyo's Jingumae area.
Ned Snowman - stock.adobe.com
Words by Vandana Pawa
The first time a Murakami x Louis Vuitton collection was released, K-pop duo TVXQ had just made their debut, the Pokémon franchise released Ruby and Sapphire, and Shanghai Knights starring Jackie Chan had just hit theaters. The year was 2003, and trailblazing Japanese artist Takashi Murakami was on the precipice of changing the face of the French fashion house for good.
After the initial release, the Louis Vuitton x Murakami collection remained in production for more than a decade, when news of its discontinuation broke in 2015 to the dismay of many fans. Ten years after the pieces were phased out from stores across the globe, the brand announced that a re-edition of the beloved collection was to be expected in two installments this year; the first was in January and the second was just a couple weeks ago. According to the brand, the collaboration, which resulted in more than 200 pieces, is a “modern-day showcase for an enduring creative bond, defined by a distinctive artistic vision, superb traditional craft, cutting-edge technology.” The designs of the rerelease include callbacks to the original collaboration, from colorful monograms on white canvas to pandas, some of which are already sold out online.
Murakami’s 2000s collaboration with Louis Vuitton, though, was not actually the artist’s first foray into the luxury fashion world, though many may believe this to be the case. In 1999, he collaborated with the Japanese brand Issey Miyake, whose creative director at the time was designer Naoki Takizawa. Takizawa, who has also been connected to other influential brands like Helmut Lang and Uniqlo, welcomed in Murakami’s “KAI KAI KI KI” collection for Issey Miyake men’s spring/summer 2000 line-–a collection that embraced the bizarre and grotesque, with a repetitive motif of eyeballs at its center, inspired by the hyakume (meaning “hundred eyes”) entity from Japanese folklore.
While Murakami was experimenting at Issey Miyake in Japan, Marc Jacobs was doing the same in the West as the creative director of Louis Vuitton. Jacobs is a known contemporary art connoisseur, having begun personally collecting pieces and befriending top names in the industry in the 1990s. With this personal interest in mind, the designer turned his tenure at the House of Vuitton into an homage to otherwise niche artists and their creations.
In choosing Murakami as a collaborator, the superflat art style—a term coined by the artist himself in years previous—took center stage in luxury fashion for the first time. The term refers to the way visuals are compressed and flattened in Japanese art and animation styles, embracing two-dimensionality. "I'd been thinking about the reality of Japanese drawing and painting and how it is different from Western art. What is important in Japanese art is the feeling of flatness. Our culture doesn't have 3-D," Murakami once said in an interview with Artnet. "Even Nintendo, when it uses 3-D, the Japanese version looks different from the U.S. version.”
When the first Louis Vuitton x Takashi Murakami collaboration was released in 2003, the standard Louis Vuitton monogram was rarely repurposed, redesigned, or reimaged, but Jacobs felt Murakami’s style warranted it, allowing the now landmark multicolor monogram bag on white and black leather canvases to be born. Additional Japanese inspiration also appeared across the collection, from cherry blossom trees to manga-inspired cartoon pandas, and even Murakami’s famed “Eye Love” motif that was previously seen on his Issey Miyake pieces made multiple appearances. When the highly anticipated collection officially released, what happened next was nothing short of historic.
In Paris, the collection sold out in a matter of minutes, while in New York, shoppers joined waitlists by the hundreds. The new designs became an instant hit, and all of popular culture embraced the new candy-colored bags with every socialite and celebrity of the 2000s—from Paris Hilton to Naomi Campbell—wearing Murakami’s designs. One of the most iconic movie characters of the era, Regina George (Rachel McAdams), even sported the collection in Mean Girls. For those who couldn’t wait to get their hands on the real thing or were turned off by the price tag, counterfeit sellers brought the bags to the masses. According to the fashion industry trade journal WWD in 2003, market sources put sales of the Murakami bags at $345 million the year of its release, which accounted for about 10 percent of the brand’s entire revenue. Murakami and Jacobs had officially created the it-bag of the millennium.
It’s unclear whether Louis Vuitton anticipated the cultural phenomenon that resulted from the initial iteration of this collaboration, but it’s evident that the brand recognizes it now and whether it’s an apt homage to the Y2K era or a fashion recession indicator, Louis Vuitton plans to continue capitalizing on it. As Jacobs once said to Vogue regarding the collaboration, "it has been, and continues to be, a monumental marriage of art and commerce.”
Published on April 1, 2025