Louis Vuitton unveils "200 Trunks 200 Visionaries"

By

Godfrey Deeny

Published
Dec 17, 2021

Louis Vuitton has unveiled "200 Trunks 200 Visionaries", an eclectic art and charity project to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of its founder.
 

From towering video giants or golden-tiled shapes to skillful illustrations and farfetched, high-tech, faintly dystopian boxes, all 200 of the objects began being displayed inside the brand’s historic home in Asnières, a western suburb of Paris.
 
The truly diverse selection ranges from Frank Gehry, the architect of the Louis Vuitton Foundation in the Bois de Boulogne, and French ceramic artist Jean-Michel Othoniel to a slew of designers including Kim Jones, Marc Jacobs and Nigo, recently appointed creative director of Kenzo, another LVMH marque.

Each creator was given carte blanche, though asked to base their ideas on a trunk or canvas measuring 50 x 5 x 100 centimeters, the approximate dimensions of the original trunk created in the 1850s by Louis Vuitton. Born on August 4, 1821, into a poor farming family in a remote village in the mountainous Jura, Louis set off to walk to Paris as a teenager in clogs, a far cry from the uber luxury for which his names stands today.
 
Othoniel, the recent subject of a retrospective in the Petit Palais, created a golden ceramic brick version of the trunk; Nigo simply covered the case in a military khaki shroud; and artist Olu Odukoya dreamed up a conceptual tomb in blond plywood with a golden reliquary and an ergonomic mummy.

After the exhibition concludes in Paris January it will move to New York, Tokyo and London as part of a world tour.

 
The project has already raised €2 million, as the visionaries directed their fees to one of 15 charitable organizations across 13 countries. Eventually, all the art objects will be sold under auction by Sotheby’s next December.
 
Many of the works were dramatic video “magic boxes” including beautiful graphic mini films by Alex Israel, Malandain on the Ballet Biarritz and Gehry. Other contributors include Alexander Ekman, Franky Zapata, Burp, Francesca Sorrenti, Fabien Cousteau and Gaetano Pesce.
 
While the acclaimed fashion exhibition curator Pamela Golbin dreamed up a mini theatre starring a cut out Louis Vuitton in a fire engine red topcoat. Marked outside read the founder’s own 1867 note, “I have a devised a trunk that is entirely free of serious disadvantages.”