For Liza Lou, the creative process is an art in and of itself. The celebrated visual artist has built her career on laborious, intricately crafted bead-work projects that challenge how we view everyday spaces and objects. Since bursting onto the contemporary art scene with Kitchen (on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 2019 to 2022), a mesmerizing 168-square-foot beaded kitchen that paid tribute to the invisible labor of women’s work, Lou has continually expanded the reach of sculpture.

Her practice spans continents, from Los Angeles to Durban, South Africa, and her painstakingly detailed works take years to complete. With solo exhibits around the globe and a MacArthur Fellowship under her belt, there’s no denying that Lou is a definitive artist of our time. Her unrivaled dedication to the artistic process made her a perfect choice for the fifth year of Louis Vuitton’s Artycapucines— a project that invites contemporary artists like past participants Daniel Buren, Peter Marino, Henry Taylor, Huang Yuxing, and Tschabalala Self to collaborate with La Maison’s artisans on unique, limited-edition versions of the iconic Capucines bag.

For her Capucines, the Los Angeles native took inspiration from her work Classification and Nomenclature of Clouds, a 2018 installation consisting of 600 handsewn beaded cloth panels. “On the surface of each panel I painted and broke away the beads, trying to capture the transitory and fleeting nature of clouds. It was a meditation on time, and the way it was made amplified its meaning,” Lou recalls of the project, which took three years to complete. Translating the epic work to the scale and functionality of a Capucines bag required innovation—but Louis Vuitton master artisans were up to the task.

“They developed a way to print and emboss the pattern of woven beads onto soft leather, which was then draped and stitched to reference my cloths, giving the bag both a new sculptural quality and also a super practical external pocket,” the artist explains.

Besides the pocket, Lou’s Capucines also features a wrist strap to shift the balance of weight from the hand—a design feature with personal significance for the artist, given that her practice requires exacting handiwork. The resulting bag encapsulates Lou and Louis Vuit- ton’s shared passion for craftsmanship. Hewn as always from premium soft leather and carefully assembled by house artisans, the familiar shape of the Capucines acts as a luxurious canvas for Lou’s stunning pattern. The fragility of her intricate beadwork is captured in a design durable enough for everyday wear— because a work of art like this bag deserves to be on display.

This story appears in the pages of V145: now available for purchase!