Louis Vuitton Is Printing a Trunk Keith Haring Drew On in 1984 Back Onto Its Bags

Louis Vuitton has built its next Artycapucines run around Keith Haring: 13 limited-edition bags made with the Keith Haring Foundation, with the first pieces going on show at Art Basel Paris, on Vuitton's own booth alongside earlier Artycapucines editions, when the fair opens to the public on October 23. The collection goes on sale worldwide on January 1. WWD reported the capsule on September 22; Louis Vuitton has published the Cruise show it grew out of, but not the bags themselves.

What makes it more than another artist capsule is where it started. In 1984 Haring covered a 1930s Louis Vuitton leather suitcase in marker drawings, his Radiant Baby among them. The house kept it. Nicolas Ghesquière found it in the archives and opened his Cruise 2027 show at the Frick Collection in New York on May 20 with a model carrying it down the runway — a one-off object, drawn on by a 26-year-old artist who had been tagging subway panels four years earlier.

Now that trunk is being reproduced as a print. Its image, patina and all, is digitally printed onto the Capucines MM Genesis bag and a Valisette Genesis mini case. The rest of the run adapts his drawings through Vuitton's own workshop techniques — leather marquetry, laser printing, embroidery, embossing, enamel detailing. The Capucines BB Holiday carries dolphins swimming alongside human figures in pink and blue, on calfskin inlaid with ostrich and karung. An evening clutch takes Running Heart, a 1984 work, under more than 12,000 crystals. Others draw on his Statue of Liberty and Big Apple graphics.

Louis Vuitton's own account of the Cruise show calls it "a graphic tribute to Keith Haring's iconic vision," where "fluid linework and chromatic pops" meet the house's heritage codes and 1980s art — and when it posted the collection, the house credited the Keith Haring Foundation directly.

Louis Vuitton / © Keith Haring Foundation

The bags are the expensive end of something wider: clothing, leather goods and accessories are coming too, and the ready-to-wear was effectively previewed at that Cruise show — a bib-front shirt reading New York, a cropped jacket with a Big Apple print, his figures running across jacket backs and bag straps. Vuitton hasn't announced prices for any of it.

There's an obvious tension in all this, and it's worth naming rather than pretending otherwise. Haring opened the Pop Shop in SoHo in 1986 to sell his imagery cheaply, on the argument that accessibility and seriousness weren't opposites, and he spent the 1980s putting drawings in subway stations where the fare was the price of admission. Those drawings are now the surface of a limited-edition handbag that will be sold at Art Basel. It isn't the first time a house has mined a recognizable piece of pop culture for a four-figure-plus object — Balenciaga just did it with Sonic the Hedgehog — but Haring is a sharper case, because democratizing his own work was the stated point of it.

The counterweight is who receives the licensing money. Haring died of AIDS-related complications in February 1990, at 31, and set up the Keith Haring Foundation the year before to fund AIDS organizations and children's programs — grants to non-profits that educate disadvantaged young people and inform the public about HIV and AIDS. Every officially licensed use of his work, this one included, runs through that. It doesn't resolve the tension, but it does mean the trunk on the runway isn't only a marketing prop.