Have bag, will travel. Suitcases have long been Louis Vuitton’s whole thing—but the one that inspired Nicolas Ghesquière’s 2027 resort collection for Louis Vuitton is something else altogether. This logoless, scruffed-up brown leather valise was customized by Keith Haring, the American Pop artist who drew inspiration from graffiti, back in 1984. (The bag, it should be noted, is much older.) “He had a habit of drawing on objects and was very generous,” Simon Castets, Executive Director of the Keith Haring Foundation, told Vogue. “He really valued ubiquity, and so he wanted to have his art on as many things as possible, and then he drew on the suitcase in that spirit.”

Used to promote the show—presented at the Frick—and carried by the first model, this was a rare outing for the piece, which was sold at Bonham’s for about $35,000 in 2020, when it became part of Louis Vuitton’s archive. That Ghesquière got special permission to use it suggests that the house was aligned with the foundation’s mission. As Castets noted, “I think it resonates with the spirit of Keith Haring to be able to share art with as wide an audience as possible and to fuel the philanthropic mission of the Foundation, and I think that’s really the most important part. [The Foundation] is directed toward HIV/AIDS, youth services, as well as arts organizations. [Haring’s] philanthropic legacy was very present during his lifetime, but is even more active since he passed tragically early.” Haring was just 31 when he died of AIDS related causes in 1990.

As European businesses look to grow their businesses stateside, New York is back in fashion—in addition to Vuitton, Gucci just showed its resort collection in Times Square. Haring, who was born in Pennsylvania, was, along with his friend Jean-Michel Basquiat, a quintessential downtown artist of the 1980s. Some of his earliest works were chalk drawings done in the subway and other public places. He believed art was for the people. Speaking with Nicole Phelps, Ghesquière revealed some of the dichotomies he was thinking about for resort. One was the city’s uptown-downtown divide, which was still in place in the ’80s, a decade that the French designer returns to over and over again, as he does with sci-fi. (Note his use of Haring’s UFO drawing.) 

There was also some time-traveling going on. Ghesquière was interested in exploring the Gilded Age, the period during which Henry Clay Frick made his fortune, much of which he spent on collecting art, from Old Masters to practitioners of the Aesthetic Movement, which he displayed in his Fifth Avenue abode. “"It was Frick’s custom to have an organist in on Saturday afternoons to fill the gallery of his mansion . . . with the majestic strains of ‘The Rosary’ and ‘Silver Threads Among the Gold’ while he himself sat on a Renaissance throne, under a baldachin, and every now and then looked up from his Saturday Evening Post to contemplate the works of Rembrandt... or Boucher. . . .” recounted Joseph Duveen, from whom Frick acquired many masterpieces, in Vogue. Into this rarified setting, Ghesquière introduced the graphic, kinetic, street-centric work of Haring to a soundtrack of Peaches, a darling of the aughts electroclash music scene.

At the same time that the special appearance of the suitcase helps advance Ghesquière’s narrative, it also brings together the concept of heritage with the physicality and material record of the past. It also showed the scarcity principle—which posits that desire increases in proportion to exclusivity (and which partly explains fashion’s fascination for vintage)—in action.

The tie-in to graffiti is especially interesting within the context of this French house, which was founded in 1854 as a leather goods company. Just short of 150 years later, in 1997, Marc Jacobs, an American, was tapped to expand the company’s offerings to include ready-to-wear. His first artist collaboration—one which was astoundingly successful and which set a template that’s still being used today—dates to 2001 when he asked artist and designer Stephen Sprouse to tag the LV logo canvas. (This successful venture was followed by many more with the likes of Takashi Murakami, Julie Verhouven, Richard Prince, and more.) Adding to the intrigue, Sprouse’s fall 1998 collection, titled Signature, was a collaboration with Haring.

Whether or not Ghesquière was paying homage to Louis Vuitton’s early 21st century history, or suggesting its relationship with artists is much older than previously thought, this resort collection is topical in the way it continues the exploration of the hierarchical relationship between art and fashion kicked off by “Costume Art” at the Met.