This is an undated handout of Hermes International’s “H Box”, a Hermes designed mobile video-art screening room.

Louis Vuitton’s online store has a $2,710 maroon handbag called “Mancrazy” with writing all over it. “Every time I meet a girl who can cook like my Mother…She looks like my Father,” it reads.

The bag is one in a range of accessories that Vuitton, a unit of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, the largest luxury- goods maker, has had co-designed by U.S. artist Richard Prince with stylist Marc Jacobs.

“I saw it as some kind of piece of architecture. You used it, but it was also something that was pretty,” said Prince, dressed in a navy cotton suit, at London’s Serpentine Gallery, where a Vuitton-sponsored show of his art opened on June 26.

“I think there’s a huge collapse between fashion, art, and music right now,” said the 58-year-old artist, standing near his images of nurses and nude biker girls. “The snobbery factor I don’t think really exists anymore. It’s because artists are much more collaborative.”

That evening, Prince gave an art talk at the gallery. The company then hosted a dinner in a monogrammed marquee with guests including model Claudia Schiffer and Charlotte Casiraghi, daughter of Monaco’s Princess Caroline.

A week later, on July 1, Prince set a new auction record when his “Overseas Nurse” (2002-3) sold for 4.24 million pounds ($8.4 million) with fees at Sotheby’s in London.

The Prince-Vuitton link is an example of the ever-closer connections between art and fashion. Where once fashion houses were invited to show at art institutions, artists are now being invited to show at — and design for — fashion houses.

Museum Sale

Vuitton has Japanese artist Takashi Murakami designing bags; a retrospective titled “©Murakami,” at New York’s Brooklyn Museum through July 13, includes a room where Murakami’s Vuitton bags are sold to visitors. The company’s flagship store on Paris’s Avenue des Champs-Elysees showcases works by James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson, and has an art space.

Hermes International SCA also has galleries in its stores, and last week held a launch at Tate Modern for its “H Box,” a Hermes-designed mobile video-art screening room (through Aug. 17). Similarly, Chanel has its own roving “Mobile Art” gallery, designed by architect Zaha Hadid, showing work inspired by its quilted bags.

More affordable brands are joining in. Gap Inc. has been selling limited-edition T-shirts by 13 artists including Jeff Koons and Chuck Close, a campaign that “celebrates the intersection of art and fashion and enables people to access contemporary art in a different way,” said Marka Hansen, president of Gap brand North America, in a May press release.

`Buying Credibility’

The fashion brands benefit. Associating with art lends a more high-brow, exclusive image, and allows product innovation.

“They’re buying credibility and apparent access to creativity,” says Stephen Bayley, the U.K. design and architecture writer who co-founded London’s Design Museum.

“Art is the ultimate luxury good: It’s unique, special, bespoke,” says Bayley. “There are so many sensationally rich people around. They’ve all got their helicopters and their jets and their boats. What they need now is art.” As art becomes a luxury status symbol, it overlaps with fashion, the luxury status symbol par excellence.

Louis Vuitton executives declined repeated requests for interviews. A Vuitton press release given out for the Serpentine show described Prince as “a dynamic part of the company fabric.” Yves Carcelle, director of LVMH’s fashion and leather- goods division, was quoted as saying Prince’s work with Jacobs “has redefined the contemporary experience of art and luxury.”

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