On October 31st, Longchamp, in collaboration with the Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative launched their collection in hommage to the American artist and specifically to his LOVE motif featured on their signature Pliage bag.
The brand underlines their common values of graphic simplicity, inventive design, and optimist colors. The collection is meant to embody the emotional resonance of the universal message of love expressed by Indiana and how it relates to the global evocative status of the Pliage bag.
“I have always admired the late American artist Robert Indiana, partly because I felt his work, which is so graphic in style and optimistic in tone, really matched the bold spirit and bright energy of Longchamp,” says Sophie Delafontaine, Longchamp’s Creative Director.
Indiana is a prominent figure of the Pop Art of the 60s and the LOVE motif was first created in 1964 as a series of frottaged drawings. In 1965, Robert Indiana was invited to propose an artwork to be featured on MoMA’s annual Christmas card. Indiana submitted several 12” square oil on canvas variations based on his LOVE image.
The museum selected the most intense color combination in red, blue, and green. It became one of the most popular cards the museum has ever offered. The LOVE sign was declined in sculptures and public installations during the rest of his career and remains his most iconic piece of work.
Indiana’s complex and multilayered work explores the power of language, American identity, and personal history, and often consists of striking, simple and direct words. Drawing on the vocabulary of vernacular highway signs and roadside entertainments, Indiana created a body of work that appears bold and energetic, simple and straight to the point.
Indiana dedicated much of his career to letters and numbers, reflecting on how their aesthetic quality could be enhanced to strengthen their meaning. He was interested in numerology and the power of signifiers in relation to one another. On that matter, a link can be drawn between the origin Pliage bag and his work.
The Pliage bag was inspired by origami, of which the primary medium is also used for writing. In that sense, the bag appears like the perfect canvas for the letters of the word LOVE and transforms the bag in not only an artwork but a medium of literal communication beyond the artistic characteristic.
For that matter, Sophie Delafontaine mentions “then, when it came to shape, we added some new bag shapes to the Le Pliage bag family that are totally square to reflect his square canvases.” or sheets of paper… There is a meaningful correspondance between the medium favored by Indiana and the primary inspiration of the Pliage bag making this collaboration particularly poetic.
Additionally, this collection expands the creative possibilities of the iconic Pliage bag that has been intensely refreshed in the past few years. Indeed, Longchamp, as a classical, world-renowned established French brand, has had a hard time standing out and keeping up with the pace of the industry. Yet, its strategy, focused on the Asian market and on attracting Gen Z testifies of its understanding of the shifting dynamics it needs to jungle with.
mabou 