The Enduring Allure of Louis Vuitton x Takashi Murakami Handbags

You couldn't escape Louis Vuitton's multicolored logo in the aughts. Paris, Jessica, and Nicole—the decades’ most emblematic mononyms—all wore the brand's colorful Speedy and Pochette handbags like arm candy in widely circulated paparazzi shots.

It started with a fashion collab. In 2003, designer Marc Jacobs—who was then creative director at Louis Vuitton—tapped artist Takashi Murakami to apply his technicolor vision to the brand's iconic LV logo, birthing the concept for the modern-day designer collaboration and launching a pop culture phenomenon that’s endured for the last 20 years. “The collab definitely had a lot of staying power,” says Elizabeth Layne, chief marketing officer at Rebag, a secondhand luxury platform. “It set the benchmark of blending high-end luxury fashion with contemporary art.”

Working alongside Jacobs, Takashi Murakami, a Japanese artist known for his pop art aesthetic and blurring the concepts of high and low culture, reimagined the centuries-old Louis Vuitton logo for the first time in the brand’s history, remaking it for the new millennium with vibrant hues that mirrored the techno-futuristic and hyper-femme aesthetics of the Y2K era.

Though Louis Vuitton has since partnered with other artists like Yayoi Kusama in 2012 and Jeff Koons in 2017, the original Takashi Murakami "Monogram Multicolore" collection, which was followed by subsequent collabs including the popular "Cherry Blossom" lineup, was a cultural vibe shift. By remaking a centuries-old logo in a flamboyant rainbow palette, the collection served as a marker of the era's seriously unserious fashion.

With its vibrant, lively aesthetic, it was also a partnership fit for the pop culture princesses immortalized in the Y2K years. From Paris Hilton, who appeared in a Saturday Night Live skit carrying two bags from “Monogram Multicolore," to Regina George, who wore a “Cherry Blossom” shoulder bag in the iconic mall scene in Mean Girls, the collab quickly became part of the pop culture lexicon of the time.

“Everyone wants to be a part of a fantasy, and this collection did so well because it is a fantasy,” says Alejandro, who runs the Instagram account @Y2KBags, focused on dissecting the handbags of the era.

Now, Louis Vuitton is reviving the legend for Gen Z with a 20th-anniversary collection. With more than 200 new items, the two-part drop—the first of which will be released on January 1—includes motifs from the original “Monogram Multicolore” and “Cherry Blossom” collections, adorning everything from iconic Louis Vuitton handbags, including the Coussin and the Speedy, to belts, wallets, wedge espadrilles, and rolling trunks.

The brand's effort to bring back the collaboration is proof of its enduring allure and commercial prowess—even 20 years later. It only took a single photo of Zendaya carrying a handbag from the re-edition lineup to send the Internet into a frenzy earlier this month. “The project acts as a modern-day showcase for an enduring creative bond, defined by artistic vision, remarkable feats of traditional craftsmanship and cutting-edge technology, and the timeless appeal of this seminal moment in early 21st-century pop and collector culture,” reads a press release from Louis Vuitton.

But this is more than just an anniversary celebration. After years of the Y2K era's greatest hits—from low-rise jeans and cargo pants to corsets and pirate-like skirts—making a comeback, it was only a matter of time before Louis Vuitton reimagined its most successful Y2K collaboration for Gen Z. “We continually have demand for all LV collaborations, but I would say the Murakami ones tend to have high sell-through rates and just move quicker,” says Layne. With the re-release, she predicts that demand for the original Louis Vuitton x Takashi Murakami handbags will increase even more.

But for Alejandro, the cross-generational appeal of luxury handbag re-editions is more about their sentimental value than ROI. “We're so fascinated with nostalgia because we weren't able to buy these things when we were younger,” he says. “And now that we have the means to find them, we go crazy.”

Through its colorful prints, this re-edition collection is also proof that the industry's quiet luxury obsession—which heralds neutral color palettes as its gospel—is being supplanted by a love affair with opulence, which showed a major resurgence on the runways for 2025. Maximalism and playful ostentation were key markers of Y2K fashion and embodied by the celebs and heiresses who carried LV purses in glitzy paparazzi photos throughout the decade.

“The concept of having wealth or just being influential—it's a collection that really did show that you could be rich and influential,” Alejandro says. “That's what we still aspire to as consumers today.”

Let’s get loud!

The Louis Vuitton x Murakami re-edition will be available on January 1, with a second drop coming in March 2025.

Read the original article on InStyle