Louis Vuitton’s Collaboration With Frank Gehry at Art Basel Paris

An associate partner of Art Basel Paris for the third consecutive year, this time, Louis Vuitton decided to dedicate its exhibition space at the Balcon d’Honneur of the Grand Palais, to renowned architect, artist and designer Frank Gehry. Here is everything you need to know about this iconic moment, merging architecture, fashion and art.  

Unique exhibition space

When it was announced that the Grand Palais would finally open its doors after two years of massive renovation works, Louis Vuitton decided that for this major comeback to the iconic art fair space as an associate partner of Art Basel Paris, taking place here from October 16 to 20, they should prepare something truly special. So they gave the central stage - when you mount the gorgeous Beaux-Arts staircase, to Frank Gehry, one of their long-standing collaborators, who put a monumental white 4.5-meter-long fish lamp a top of it, a nod to the central figure of his architectural vision, and his fetish animal. Once Gehry famously declared that for him the fish’s body is “the model for the future of architecture because it expresses sculptural movement, I realised that its shape and that feeling of movement was something that I wanted to start capturing in a building. The movement became my ornament.” The artist himself helped conceive the scenography of the exhibition space, revisiting his works for the brand, through a selection of witty objects, drawings and models that he created during the last twenty years.

Louis Vuitton by Frank Gehry

Frank Gehry has been working for Louis Vuitton for more than 20 years. First and foremost, he created the glass and still building for the Louis Vuitton Foundation, one of the most exciting contemporary art spaces in Paris, located at the edge of the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the Bois de Boulogne, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. At the exhibition space at the Grand Palais, one could spot an array of illustrations, some dating back to 2006, and scale models highlighting Gehry’s signature use of openings and glass, like the spatial transpositions of a crystalline dream. Other highlights included limited-edition perfume bottles with colourful Murano glass caps, imagined by Gehry in 2022, evoking both flowers and flames and reminiscent of his monumental floating buildings. At Art Basel Paris they were accompanied by his sketches and preliminary models in different materials revealing the creative process behind these dynamic and iridescent pieces. But that’s not all: there was also the very first sculptural bag, the Twisted Box, created for Louis Vuitton in classic monogram canvas by Gehry in 2014 in honour of Maison’s 160 anniversary, a part of the Celebrating Monogram collection. Inspired by the classic Louis Vuitton trunk, this funky bag does look a bit like an iron, and its semi-deformed twisted form is truly magical, at the exhibition it was presented with its reeditions in mirror silver and matt black. Other highlights included a series of state-of-the-art Capucine bags reimagined by the master and revealed for the very first time. They were inspired by Gehry’s best-known buildings - the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Walt Disney Concrete Hall in Los Angeles, the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, and the IAC Building à New York, and the totem-animal of the exhibition, the fish, which was also seamlessly integrated into the iconic and limited edition Capucine designs.  

Courtesy: Louis Vuitton

Text: Lidia Ageeva