Louis Vuitton has turned its corner of the Grand Palais into a seven-year survey of artist-designed handbags. As an associate partner of Art Basel Paris, the house unveiled an Artycapucines retrospective on the Balcon d'Honneur, announced on 20 October and open to the public from 23 to 25 October alongside the fair.

Staged in the spirit of a group show, the booth pairs each bag with a work by the artist who designed it — fourteen artists in all. Alex Israel's finned 2023 bag hangs beside Cut-Out-Fin (Golden Hour) from 2019; Urs Fischer's Fruits (2026) answers the banana suspended from his design; Sam Falls's foliage bag echoes Western Wind (2025); and Tschabalala Self's layered leather composition mirrors Kitten (2026). The display also nods to the house's origins as a trunk-maker, with open crates, plinths and trunk-like structures in brushed aluminium and cotton canvas.

The retrospective doubles as a launchpad: the booth introduces the new Artycapucines collection dedicated to Keith Haring, shown alongside a 1930s Louis Vuitton suitcase the artist signed in the 1980s. Three longstanding collaborators are honoured as well — Takashi Murakami's Monogramouflage Skull (Black) (2008) with his 2025 "Capucines XXL Camo," the late Yayoi Kusama's Great Gigantic Pumpkin (2023), and the late Frank Gehry's fish-shaped lamps, Untitled (Paris II) (2012). Material experiments run throughout, from Kennedy Yanko's metal-and-paint-skin Because of its blues (2025) to Liza Lou's glass-bead Lost Blue (2022) and Billie Zangewa's embroidered-silk Soldier of Love (2020).

Louis Vuitton's chief executive told WWD the project stages a two-way exchange between the art that inspired the bags and the bags that inspired the artists. The house places the series in a lineage running back to its first artist collaboration, with Pierre Legrain in 1920 — and, for the first time, a selection of Louis Vuitton Editions books will be sold at the Art Basel Store, the most accessible souvenir on a booth of museum-grade handbags.