Remembering Louis Vuitton x Richard Prince

In honor of Marc Jacobs’s birthday, we take a look back at one of his most iconic works: Louis Vuitton x Richard Prince.

The year was 2007 and the vision was groundbreaking. Imagine: artist Richard Prince’s nurses, brought to life in the flesh by one of fashion’s greats, Marc Jacobs, for legacy brand Louis Vuitton’s spring 2008 show, where he was creative director at the time. The nurses directly reflected Richard Prince’s early 2000s paintings inspired by covers of midcentury pulp fiction.

Naomi Campbell, Eva Herzigova, Stephanie Seymour and nine other models walked down the runway in sheer pastel nurse get-ups with matching little hats, each embellished with one scarlet letter that together spelled out the “Louis Vuitton” name. There is so much to unpack in these opening looks of the show, that everything begins to verge on post ironic. Models wore their hair in 1950s style retro curls, with sheer logo face masks. Each model held the poetic bags created in collaboration with Richard Prince.

The opening looks of the collection were memorialized in the campaign, showcasing the classic Louis Vuitton logo bag in a distressed watercolor fade, trimmed in snakeskin and accented with sardonic wife jokes from Richard Prince’s 1980s series. “The jokes came out of drawing the cartoons,” he once said. “I wanted to draw and I liked the way certain cartoons were drawn. So I decided to redraw the ones I liked. This was 1985. I was living in Los Angeles. I drew a lot of Whitney Darrow cartoons. He was actually a friend of Jackson Pollock…I picked out about a dozen jokes…ones that were familiar, the ones that get retold, and wrote them out, by hand on small pieces of paper. Paper and pencil. Pencil on paper.” 

Louis Vuitton x Richard Prince spring 2008 bag details. Images via Vogue Runway

Other bags from the collaboration, like the Firebird, are equally as iconic. Some might remember when Carrie Bradshaw gifted her assistant Louise the Richard Prince x Louis Vuitton Motard Firebird bag on screen. The colorful patchwork is contrasted with the juicy pastel cabochons.

It was a time in fashion and art when the conversation of copycat culture and appropriation was just beginning to bud, as social media was in its very early days. Prince, as the ultimate star of appropriation and challenger of the forever question “is it art?”, was the perfect choice for a collection that intended to spark both visual interest and conceptual zeitgeist.

“At some point in the next 20 to 30 years, an astute collector of Marc Jacobs’s clothing will be sitting on a gold mine of information,” wrote Cathy Horyn in 2008. “Distance is required to appreciate the designs he has done for Louis Vuitton and his own label — the randomness, the appropriations, the superficial strafing of culture.” I think she may be right: in 2026, it seems like vintage Marc Jacobs designs are being appreciated in a new light, and the new Marc by Sofia documentary only adds to the history.

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