Discover Damien Hirst’s limited-edition bottles for Dom Pérignon, a twist on the artist’s Kaleidoscope series
The champagne house has collaborated with Hirst on two special labels, for its Dom Pérignon Vintage 2018 and Rosé Vintage 2010
Cultural collaboration is essential to Dom Pérignon. The prestigious vintage champagne house launched its first partnership in 2005 with Karl Lagerfeld, and it has since collaborated with a cohort of global creatives, including Lady Gaga, David Lynch, Lenny Kravitz, Tokujin Yoshioka, Björk and Chris Cunningham, Jeff Koons and Michael Riedel.
Now, taking over the creative baton is British artist Damien Hirst, who references his 2001 Kaleidoscope paintings for Dom Pérignon’s 2026 Limited Edition. Energetic and vibrant, the series’ geometric shapes were originally made using brightly coloured butterfly wings arranged in complex concentric patterns. Here, they are playfully reinterpreted into a colourful motif featuring miniature versions of the champagne house’s distinctive shield label. Founded on the idea of transformation and repetition, the kaleidoscope is a recurring motif in Hirst’s work.
‘Dom Pérignon makes great champagne,’ says Hirst, on why the collaboration felt like a natural one. ‘It’s a beautiful product with mega associations, in beautiful bottles. They’ve also worked with amazing artists over the years who’ve designed some incredible bottles. And they’re not just a factory that makes products for the market, they are skilled craftspeople and I love working with people on this level who think about what they make and are skilled at what they do.’
Hirst’s design for the label is the perfect symbol for Dom Pérignon’s assemblages, designed to reveal the harmony between the grapes of each vintage, despite their unpredictable characters. It reminds us that vintage champagne is not something to be simply poured, but rather to be savoured, and that the smallest details – a bottle’s design, the sound it makes when opened, and its shared environment – can have the greatest impact.
Hirst realised that the Kaleidoscope series would be the right choice for the label. ‘I knew straight away,’ he adds. ‘Dom Pérignon’s iconic shield is symmetrical down the centre and so it jumped out at me like a butterfly and became my starting point. And even the word “assemblage” came up, which is used in both winemaking and art. A Dom Pérignon vintage is an assemblage of grapes, so the Kaleidoscope series felt like a good fit because it’s an assemblage of butterfly wings collected in the real world.’
Accordingly, Hirst presents two chromatic designs: the first, for Dom Pérignon Vintage 2018, is a deep blue, symbolising infinity and spirituality, while the second, for the Rosé Vintage 2010, features a warm and gentle pink design. ‘Capturing the character of the wines was an initial worry, but I think in the end, through using a minimal set of colours we’ve done it really well,’ says Hirst. ‘It’s craftsmanship meets imagination, tradition meets reinvention. I love aesthetics and always have but never at the expense of function. And the shield really does look like one of my butterflies.’
If he could gift a bottle to any cultural icon, who would it be? ‘I’d give it to Jack White as a congratulations on his Newport Street Gallery exhibition and all the amazing music he makes,’ says Hirst, who owns the gallery. ‘I think he’d appreciate that, even after the show, I’m still thinking about him and his work, and I’d hope that he’d appreciate how the show we just made is very much a work of collaboration. Where I had to understand Jack’s work and where it’s coming from in order to go along with his vision and help him to make it shine.’
A version of this article will appear in the November 2026 Art Issue of Wallpaper*, available from 8 October in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.
