The 2023 edition of Louis Vuitton’s Artycapucines collection sees five leading contemporary artists – Billie Zangewa, Ewa Juszkiewicz, Liza Lou, Tursic & Mille and Ziping Wang – bring their unique visions to the classic and timeless Capucines bag.

Since the first collection in 2019, the Capucines bag – named after rue Neuve-des-Capucines, the Parisian street where Louis Vuitton opened his first store in 1854 – has provided a perfect blank canvas for 29 contemporary artists to create an Artycapucines. The five latest designs pay testament to the collection’s ability to unite the artist’s talent and invention with the ingenuity and craftsmanship of the Maison’s masterful artisans. 

Billie Zangewa – born in Malawi and living in South Africa – uses deliberately imperfect patchworks of raw silk to create landscapes and portraits. Her Artycapucines sees her 2020 work The Swimming Lesson – featuring her son Mika – recreated using a combination of high-definition, trompe-l’œil printing, expressive embroidery and intentionally visible hand-stitching.

Long interested in female identity and its suppressed role in the Western canon, the Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz chose to transfer her characteristically striking and surrealist 2021 work Ginger Locks (2021) to a Capucines using a high-definition print, set off by a string of golden pearls.

American artist Liza Lou is perhaps best-known for her use of beads in both large-scale sculptures – such as Kitchen (1995) – and more intimate artworks. For her Artycapucines, that subtle and beautifully textural bead work is embossed into soft leather, which is then delicately printed in pastel colours and draped around the Capucines bag like a sculptural second skin.

Billie Zangewa
Ewa Juszkiewicz
Liza Lou

Franco-Serbian artistic duo Tursic & Mille bring their interest in image overload in contemporary society and recontextualisation to their Capucines, and reinvent the bag in a signature flower shape that is then used as a frame for the richly embroidered and coloured version of their 2021 painting Tenderness, accompanied by a charred cedarwood handle and inlaid Louis Vuitton logo.

Chinese artist Ziping Wang’s mini-Artycapucines is the smallest bag in the collection so far; a delightful confection of leather patchwork and marquetry in bright vivid colours and candy-sweet motifs, and a powerful commentary on our visually saturated and self-reflexive world. 

Tursic & Mille
Ziping Wang

All bags in the 2023 Artycapucines Collection, presented in specially designed boxes, will be available in limited editions of 200.