Louis Vuitton x Stephen Sprouse Tribute Poster, Not For Sale, 2009

Produced for the launch of Louis Vuitton’s Tribute to Stephen Sprouse collection, celebrated in New York in January 2009 with events at the Louis Vuitton SoHo store, Deitch Projects and the Bowery Ballroom. Three poster designs were made for the launch, and this is one of them. The posters were used at the release events and were never sold, as far as is known.

Sprouse first worked with the house in 2000, at the invitation of Marc Jacobs. Jacobs reportedly had the idea after seeing a Monogram trunk painted over in black at Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Paris apartment. The resulting Graffiti collection, released in 2001, was the first time the Monogram had been written over, and it began the series of artist collaborations that later included Takashi Murakami and Richard Prince. Sprouse died in 2004. Five years later, Jacobs returned to his work with a tribute collection of graffiti and Sprouse’s roses, a motif he had developed in the 1970s by enlarging photographs of flowers on a Xerox machine. The launch was timed to “Rock on Mars,” a retrospective of Sprouse’s work at Deitch Projects. Jacobs described the collection as an attempt to “make it Vuitton’s work for Stephen, not Stephen’s work for Vuitton.”

An offset-printed poster with a neon green stencil portrait of Sprouse set against the Louis Vuitton Monogram. The words “Tribute to Stephen Sprouse” appear below in hot pink graffiti lettering. The posters appear to have been distributed folded, and this one shows its original fold lines. It measures 59 × 83.5 cm.