Marc on Murakami

it was such a whim. My mind absorbs things in a funny way. I’m on planes quite a bit and I always take stacks and stacks of magazines and I go through them and tear pages out and fold them up, and they get stuck at the bottom of my backpack or whatever. I’d seen an article about Takashi. I just remember the graphic. It was the DOB character, a funny Mickey Mouse–type thing. I didn’t really read the article; I was just drawn to the graphic. A couple months later there was another magazine and a different graphic, but again I tore it out—and I wasn’t aware that it was the same artist. Then I received a Christie’s catalogue and on the back cover there was a statue of Hiropon—that’s the female figure that’s squirting milk out of her breasts in an arc. I looked at the statue and then I remember going online and reading the essay that accompanied it. It talked about Takashi’s references to Warhol and the Factory, and how Takashi credited the artists he worked with. I lived not far from the Cartier Foundation, so I walked by there one weekend, and there was an enormous show of his work. I went on a Saturday and then on Monday I came to the office and I just thought, I wonder if that guy would ever be interested in collaborating on something for Vuitton? So we sent him an e-mail, and he was really interested. But my e-mail was so vague: "I would love to know if you’d be interested in coming and having a meeting . . .”



A few days later, he arrived with a team of Japanese assistants and the other artists he works with. They came into my office—my dog was there, the other designers I work with were there, there was stuff all over the walls. He just started taking pictures and making videotapes, and then we started talking. Neither one of us was very specific about what we wanted out of this thing, but we decided that we would do something together.



And, again, I think it drove people in legal a little crazy. They always like to know, "What are we actually commissioning? How do we know what to pay him for if we don’t know what you’re asking him?” And then I say, "Well, it’s gonna be a little bit organic and you’re just gonna have to follow me on it.” Again, we discussed reinterpreting, reinventing, and creating a new monogram. We talked about changing the icons of the symbols within the monogram into other images. We talked about so many different things. And Takashi and I just sort of decided that throughout the summer he would send me things that he had in mind, and I would just make notes on them, or draw on them, or comment on them, and send them back. And so, via the Internet, we ended up with all this work.



We started making bags out of the artwork that he sent. Things would come through as jpegs, and I’d just comment and do funny little drawings and write notes in the margins and stuff and send them back, and we’d go back and forth. And then we had the fashion show where we showed all the stuff, and everybody loved it. It was crazy. We opened the show with all these girls carrying these things, and we did the makeup to look like one of his statues, a manga, sort-of-anime figure. And then I had asked him to create the entrance to the show space. We were showing at the Glass Greenhouse, the same place we showed the Sprouse collection. So I asked Takashi to design something that would make for a very important entrance into the space. He did these inflatable sculptures in this multicolored monogram.



Takashi was so pleased with what we had done that he then had a show at Marianne Boesky Gallery where he showed his paintings, which were inspired by the work that we had done together. He had an actual art show of work that he had done after seeing the fashion show.


Marc Jacobs describing bringing Japanese artist Takashi Murakami to Louis Vuitton (from Interview Magazine). Images from Takashi Murakami exhibition at Marianne Boesky Gallery April-May 2003.



New York Magazine: Do you get self-conscious seeing yourself in magazine spreads?
Marc Jacobs: Yeah, but I love the attention


And to close here's a great article on Marc Jacobs from a recent issue of GQ - Marc Jacobs Doesn't Give a F---