Fashion mashup: artist Jeff Koons on creating bags with Louis Vuitton

In a gallery within Jeff Koons’s New York studio down by the old Hudson rail yards, young painters are working with calm, silent intensity on a dozen huge canvases: reproductions of the Old Masters that will join Koons’s ‘Gazing Ball’ series.

In the midst of this activity sits Jeff Koons himself, examining with visible pride the five bags that represent the first fruits of his collaboration with Louis Vuitton.

How did your collaboration with Louis Vuitton begin? Were you issued with a brief?

What's wonderful about working with Louis Vuitton is that there really aren't parameters. When they come and speak to you about a project, everybody already has an understanding of what the possibilities are to create something special. We both had the same objective: we wanted to make something that really uses material, texture and colour to communicate and create something desirable. So there was tremendous freedom.

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This first series of bags features paintings from your recent 'Gazing Ball' series of paintings, in which you created large-scale reproductions of works by the Old Masters and displayed them with a mirrored globe - a 'gazing ball'. Why did that series seem right for your collaboration with Louis Vuitton?

What the 'Gazing Ball' series of paintings is really about is communicating how when you give it up to something else, when you find something of greater interest outside yourself, you're able to achieve transcendence and have a life with greater breadth to it. I chose artists for these bags who were each giving it up to someone else.

They were saying, "This artist I find more interesting than what I am doing," and "This artist also found somebody else". These artists are making reference to other artists, and they find something outside themselves that's greater than themselves. It's a form of love, and we all practise this every day in our life. If we want to achieve transcendence, we are able to look at even the simplest thing outside ourselves, or the most complex, and find awe and wonderment in that. And our parameters expand.

How did you select the five artists who appear in this collection?

I wanted to choose five stories that really could communicate what we're trying to achieve with the entire collaboration. So we chose Rubens' The Tiger Hunt, which is quite powerful and moving. We have the Mona Lisa by Leonardo. We have Fragonard's Girl with Dog, we have Titian's Mars, Venus and Cupid, and we have Van Gogh's A Wheatfield with Cypresses. We tried to choose works that would fully communicate the parameters of the project, by having landscape but also dynamic paintings, Baroque paintings but also intimate paintings about love.

Really, the breadth of the canon of art history from a present-day point of view. And you have the connections right there in artists linking with each other - like Rubens' Tiger Hunt, which is based on Leonardo's Battle of Anghiari. You have all these different levels of intimacy and emotion taking place, and everybody's interconnected. I like to think of it as part of my own DNA.

In the process of translating your paintings to your collection, the gazing ball has gone. Were you tempted to include the gazing ball as a detail on the bags?

I believe that because the human body becomes involved with the bags, the gazing ball isn't necessary. When people are walking down the street with the bag, there's already this inner linkage taking place. So I didn't feel the need for it. I also have the rabbit there, which is kind of an iconic image of my own, representing my involvement.

Why did you choose to put the names of the artists in big shiny letters on the bags?

Having the names of the artists in reflective type is in a way performing a function like the gazing ball in the 'Gazing Ball' paintings. But there's also a reflective process about the person being interlinked with the bag. To walk around with something that shows you really believe in giving it up to things outside yourself - it's another form of reflectivity.

You've mentioned in the past that you want your artwork to inspire emotional states in people. What emotional states are you hoping to create in the people who carry these bags?

One of the things I really enjoyed in working with Louis Vuitton on these bags is that both of us have this great desire to use craft, materials and detail to communicate to the public, to the owner of the bag, to the viewer of the bag, what we really care about. We don't just care about being able to make a stitch perfect: we're communicating to the viewer and to the owner of the bag that we care about them.

I care about the viewer, not detail for detail's sake. So I hope somebody who sees the bag or acquires the bag can emotionally feel this connectivity, can feel a sense of union. And not just with the artist of that bag. If they happen to have the Van Gogh bag, [that connection] is not just with Van Gogh. Van Gogh loved Gauguin and loved the Dutch Old Masters and loved Rubens. There's all of this interconnectivity.

So is one of the aims of this project to place the person who carries the bag in a lineage that includes these artists, the artists they're referencing, and yourself? To place everyone within a network of connection?

You know, from the time that I was a young artist, the only thing I wanted to do was to participate. I wanted to be part of the group; I wanted to be part of the avant-garde with Picasso and Dalí and Picabia. And then as I learnt more and more about art history, I appreciated participating in a larger family group. I really am just enjoying celebrating humanity, enjoying a sense of family that we all have every day in our lives: from our family around us to the things and people that move us and inspire us.

I read somewhere that you were painting copies of the Old Masters as a kid in your dad's garage. Is that true?

I started painting Old Masters when I was about nine years old. My father had a furniture store; he was an interior decorator, and he was really my first dealer. My parents gave me so much confidence and support. When I finished my first paintings, my father put them right in the centre of his showroom window. So in York, Pennsylvania, there's several Old Master paintings out there. But the 'Gazing Ball' series of paintings and the bags are not just a copy of the painting. They're a transcendence of that. It becomes something else. It's about the idea of Leonardo and it's about Leonardo the human being. But it's also about who Leonardo loved: Verrocchio, Uccello. All of the people that he would give it up to that let him become. It's a celebration of humanism.

What aspects of Louis Vuitton's own heritage did you look to when creating this series of bags?

What's wonderful about working with Louis Vuitton are their resources. They're the finest resources in the world. Often if I start a project with a new group of people, I expect that when samples come at the very beginning I'm going to have to push them harder in this direction or that direction. But with Louis Vuitton, the first samples come through and it's like, 'Wow! I never saw that before. That's a better sample than anything I've seen before.'

They're using the best resources in the world. And they're celebrating materials, they're celebrating craft. And the reason for doing that is to be able to be generous with people, and to show how much they care about an individual. I do the same thing with the craft in my work. When I spend so much time and effort on the surface of a sculpture or the refinement of a painting, it's because I'm trying to communicate to the viewer that I care about them, and that everything, all communication, is based on trust. And that's in all of Louis Vuitton's materials and craft too.

You've also reconfigured the Louis Vuitton Monogram, modifying it with your own initials. Louis Vuitton have never allowed anyone to alter the Monogram in this way before. Was it difficult to get permission to do that?

In working with the bag, I had the idea to also make the JK like the LV, and have them side by the side. I thought that it gave a new energy to everything. It made the bags special and I think - just for this moment, on this special series - it expands the brand and its parameters.

As you've said, you also had the rabbit on the bags as a symbolic reference to Jeff Koons. What do you think the rabbit says about you as an artist?

I think it's a symbol of generosity. It can have many different meanings. To one person it can be a symbol of the Playboy bunny; to another, a symbol of resurrection. I think it's one of the most iconic images that I've created. And I wanted to have something that could show immediately, 'This is a Jeff Koons bag; Jeff created this bag.' But I did not want to be heavy-handed. I just wanted something that could match the iconic quality of the Louis Vuitton Monogram.

Do you see this collection as art or as fashion?

If I had to classify them I would think about them as art. To me, art is something which lets us become more aware of our life, our potential. The art is never the object - it's the object's ability to communicate to us that we can continue to have vaster lives. And I think a Louis Vuitton product does that: it communicates that through all the time and craft and materials it entails. And my art tries to do that also, through ideas and through the same appreciation of craft.

Do you have an interest in fashion?

I enjoy fashion. When I go out, I like to wear a nice suit and feel comfortable. And then there are moments that I just enjoy being completely casual in my studio in jeans and a sweatshirt. But even that's a form of fashion. It's a way of communicating in this discourse about our bodies and our environment. And everything in life is about that philosophical dialogue about our interior life and our exterior life and how those two affect each other. So I do have an interest in fashion.

What was your primary objective in undertaking this project: to make a statement, or to create a desirable object?

My primary motivation was to celebrate life! To make something special. This is the time we live in. I've been productive up to this point and I really still have a chance to make things I want to make. And I wanted to make this special grouping of bags with Louis Vuitton.