Louis Vuitton are nothing if not pioneers in the fine art of innovative commingling. Collaborating with some of the sharpest creative minds for the last 150 years, Vuitton’s artistic agenda was fully galvanized at the hands of creative Director Marc Jacobs, when he took to the helm in 1997.
After collaborating extensively with Stephen Sprouse and Japanese monolith Takashi Murakami (our favourite project came in the shape of the Vuitton Street Hawkers installation at Murakami’s MOCA exhibition in LA back in 2008), Jacobs turned his beady creative eye to the painterly talents of Richard Prince.
This month will see the zenith of Prince and Louis Vuitton’s collaborative relationship at Hong Kong’s 17th French May Art Festival.
Using his After Dark series as a starting point, Prince has adapted his post-pop, pulp-fiction book covers (a different After Dark Mills & Boon-esque book cover for each capital city) and weaved together a colossal After Dark tapestry with which he will wrap the exterior façade of Hong Kong’s Museum of Art against the backdrop of Victoria Harbour.
See more of Prince’s wrapping
The cities featured in Prince’s blown-up book covers, range from Paris to London, Bangkok and back again - with every second section of the tapestry featuring a Hong Kong cover, in a site-specific nod to the cities ever-emergent cultural status.
This will not be the first time Prince has used his book cover tapestry technique – back in 2007 at Vuitton’s Paris Fashion week show, the Cour Carrée de Louvre was draped in a scaled-down version of Prince’s off-kilter quilt.
