In the restored Grand Palais, sunlight pours through the glass dome and floods Takashi Murakami’s newest collaboration with life. You see color everywhere—on walls, fabrics, even air. Murakami, Japan’s master of “Superflat,” brings his world of smiling flowers and playful skulls back into focus with Louis Vuitton for the latest Artycapucines VII collection.
Unveiled during Art Basel Paris 2025, the project marks 20 years since Murakami first shook fashion with Vuitton’s monogram. This time, he turns the Capucines bag into fine art. Eleven designs. Two hundred pieces. Each one a small, bright rebellion against the idea that handbags and galleries belong in different worlds.
Walk into the exhibition and you can’t miss it—an eight-meter inflatable octopus hovers above, drenched in pinks and electric blues. Below it sits the Cherry Blossom Plush Ball, reimagined as a handbag charm that looks like it jumped out of an anime dream. You know immediately this isn’t just about fashion—it’s Murakami’s way of collapsing hierarchies. What you wear becomes part of his art.
Takashi Murakami has always done this. He trained in nihonga, traditional Japanese painting, but didn’t fit in. He wanted to mix tradition with pop. When Japan’s economy crashed in the 1990s, he created Superflat—a theory and a look that erased the wall between high art and everyday culture. His paintings and sculptures feature grinning cartoon faces and cuteness that hides darker ideas about life, death, and consumption.
If you followed him in the 2000s, you remember the moment he entered fashion history. In 2003, Marc Jacobs invited him to reinvent Vuitton. Murakami flooded the brown LV monogram with 60 colors and turned elegance into play. The Monogram Multicolore line became an icon, and collectors still pay tens of thousands for it today. That collaboration didn’t just change bags; it changed how you looked at luxury.
The partnership ended in 2015, but its influence never faded. You could see traces of it later in Virgil Abloh’s streetwear couture and Kanye West’s Yeezy universe. Every time fashion leaned into fun, Murakami’s fingerprints were there.
Now, at 63, he’s still pushing forward. In 2025, he and Louis Vuitton reunited to celebrate their 20-year story. They opened a pop-up in Soho filled with archival bags and new sculptural pieces—giant smiling flowers blooming from handbags. The new Artycapucines builds on that energy. Some bags show otters swimming across soft leather. Others shimmer with cherry blossoms in Murakami’s glossed palette. Prices start around €5,000 and climb into six figures for sculptural editions, but these pieces aren’t just for display—they travel, they move, they live.
While collectors scramble for these limited bags, Takashi Murakami is also experimenting in digital space. You can now join Murakami.Flowers, a trading card game connected to NFTs on the Base blockchain. Each player collects cards featuring his familiar smiling blooms. NFT owners can claim free physical boxes of 25 cards, shipped anywhere. The game merges art, technology, and play, turning the screen into a new gallery. It feels natural for him—a man who always treated high culture and pop culture as equals.
This isn’t Murakami’s first digital leap. In 2022, he worked with Nike’s RTFKT studio on CloneX avatars and metaverse wearables, bringing his flowers into virtual fashion. Those projects blurred lines between art and technology, just as his Vuitton work blurs craft and luxury.
Critics see this moment as Murakami’s renewal. At Gagosian, viewers line up for his solo show, Hiroshige’s 100 Famous Views of Edo: Japonisme Reconsidered, where classic Japanese prints meet the Superflat philosophy. In Amsterdam, his Moco Museum retrospective draws long queues, each person waiting to stand beneath a smiling flower and take a photo that connects art history to pop fantasy.
Through all these projects, Murakami keeps proving one thing: he doesn’t repeat himself. He reinvents how you see art and where you find it. A handbag becomes a stage. A card deck becomes a canvas. Even a plush toy turns into philosophy. He’s not just working across mediums; he’s pulling them together.
As Art Basel buzzes with talk about sales and collaborations, Murakami quietly changes the rules again. He doesn’t separate what’s elite from what’s joyful. He invites you to look closer, to treat color and cartoon not as decoration but as commentary.
When you hold one of his bags or scroll through his NFT cards, you join a conversation that started decades ago—between Japan’s past and its digital now. Murakami’s world is bright, strange, and deeply human. It asks you to see beauty in overload and find meaning where others see merchandise.
Maybe that’s the point. In Murakami’s universe, luxury isn’t about status. It’s about curiosity. Every piece—a painting, a game, a bag—asks you to look again, to question what belongs in a museum and what belongs in your hand.
This isn’t just another collaboration. It’s an open invitation—to step into a world where art follows you home.
Takashi Murakami : Youtube | Website | Instagram
Louis Vuitton : Instagram
Sources : ArtNews | Dezeen | Medium | Murakami Flowers | The Broad
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