Big Metaphor: Takashi Murakami Meets Louis Vuitton

Big Metaphor: Takashi Murakami Meets Louis Vuitton

Brian Zhao Zhong

     Would you ever expect that a Japanese pop artist would be able to persuade a general audience to purchase the product of a French based high fashion brand? The response to this question, will be mostly negative because the inner connection of these two entities just too hard to find. Generally speaking, when a customer thinks about fashion, they tend to visualize a front cover of magazine featuring tall, skinny models to sell the product. Also, when people perceive animation, they tend to deviate its content from any materialistic culture. However, this paper is going to tell you that it is possible for an animation to upsell a luxurious handbag. Specifically, contemporary Japanese pop artist Takashi Murakami and French high-end fashion brand, Louis Vuitton, working together to produce a legendary line of product, and the success that came out of the video that Murakami composed to promote the collection.

The thematic subject of this paper is going to take you to the magical kingdom of rhetoric and look everything in a rhetorical lenses; in which, this paper will argue that Takashi Murakami as a rhetor, is able to successfully apply the rhetorical situation into his construction of the artifact (promotional short film); if artifact film is like a metaphor, Louis Vuitton would be the tenor and Takashi Murakami’s animation would be the vehicle. In a rhetorical study setting, we are going to mostly explore Murakami’s persuasion technique and analyze how he constructs this metaphor. Before we perform any analytical procedures, it is essential to have some background knowledge.

This collaboration took place almost eleven years ago, as Marci Kwon put it this way “In the year of 2002, Murakami rocketed to prominence with the help of Marc Jacobs, the creative director of esteemed French fashion hour Louis Vuitton. Jacobs commissioned Murakami to design a limited edition series of handbags, which combined the artists sense of color and character with Vuitton’s iconic LV monogram”(Kwon p.46). The short film seemed to be a byproduct of the collaboration; however, it is not the case. Because of the short film it established a more explicit connection for pop art and fashion as Foss refers to as the “commonplace” in the metaphor criticism, its prominent place in this entire campaign is nonpareil. Thus, the collaboration film cannot be underestimated.

The collaboration short film is both an image and narrative-driven video taking place in an “obsession with manga and animation” (BBC 7:52). Specifically, the storyline of the film followed a simplistic path. There are the two main characters – a young girl who is standing at a busy Tokyo street outside of a Louis Vuitton store, and the Panda monster who came directly from the magical land of “Superflat”. Murakami shot this animation in a third person angle that is placed inside the animated store of Louis Vuitton. The girl is texting and wondering around to check if her friends are coming or not. Suddenly, she accidentally drops her cell on the ground, and that is the moment when Murakami’s famous monster figure shows up. Murakami’s animal-like monster first picks up her cellphone and tries to fool her by faking the intent of returning her phone. When the girl tries to get back the phone, Panda monster eats her phone disarming both the girl and audience’s expectation; after the initial shock, the girl becomes angry and starts to punch the monster. Monster is smiling the whole time without any verbal communication. Key point occurs after a few punches – the monster eats the girl as well. While we are still wondering about this odd moment, the girl is on her way to the wonderland of “Superflat” and Louis Vuitton. After going through a LV monogram path, she stepped into a hyper animated space where everywhere the colorful Louis Vuitton logo is seen. There are more animated characters such as small elfin-like angel and gigantic mushroom that can blow the “LV” logo wind. The girl traveled through the space without gravity, which is a clear deviation from the real world. She experienced something dashing and magical. By the time her experience approaches the end, she finally finds a military colored hand that is arranged like a LV logo. The logo is created by military colored arm with a palm at the end, and the phone is in one of the palm. After retrieving the phone, she continuously travels through the space while taking some pictures. She caught the Panda monster bamboos. Then sends a multimedia message to all her friends, and receives an enormous reply on how they don’t believe she gone through this. With the smile of the little elfin-like angel, she transforms quickly back to the same place before where she was eaten by the Panda monster. At the meantime, her friends come and grab her, and right before she leaves the front of the Louis Vuitton store, she opens her phone, there is a piece of bamboo leaf and picture of Panda monster where it concludes the entire film.

Upon finishing the description part of the film, there are a couple instances that are noteworthy. First, the aesthetic appeal that came through the film is sturdy and unique, as an audience, we are merged into the animation as well. In other words, the dashing, magical experience is not only for the little girl, but also for us to taste and grasp. Second, the odd moment is compelling and the narrative is making great sense here. It all seemed that this short film itself has set up a great premise, a fundamental challenge for us to dive into in terms of the study of rhetoric. In this paper, we are going to employ four major different kind of rhetorical criticism, which include, classical, narrative, ideological, and conceptual.

We start off the video by applying the classical criticism that is introduced in the rhetorical criticism reading. First, the overarching telos is to increase both branding awareness and popularity. Aside from the telos, this paper previously did not elaborate what the commonplace really is. In fact, the telo leads us to think of the commonplace: commerce. Louis Vuitton would be easy to consider commerce because they are in the luxury retail business. However, Takashi Murakami is one of the artists who achieves the artistic and commerce level at the same time. As Kwon confirmed that, “a look back at what can now be understood as the millennial art world’s decadent period reveals an overlap between art and commerce that is unprecedented in its degree and pervasiveness.  On the forefront of this exploration is art star Takashi Murakami, who has gathered tremendous amount of fame with entities such as luxury goods conglomeration Louis Vuitton” (Kwon p.27). Based on the commonplace of commerce to link Murakami and Vuitton, the denotative meaning out of the video is trying to say that Louis Vuitton is like a piece of Murakami animation art, they are both sellable. Couple things that this artifact video is trying to sell: magical experience with Louis Vuitton space and the aesthetic appreciation of an art.

With a more concrete definition of “commonplace”, we continue our discussion of classical criticism. The use of ethos, pathos and logos are quite apparent. This film as a whole is demonstrating ethos because the animation character from “Superflat” is the iconic creation from Takashi Murakami and “LV” monogram print is the most iconic, identifiable image from Louis Vuitton. If we consider the characteristics inside the video, their ethos is more synthetic and artful. Together, both Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami kept a consistent style in presenting their character; they minimized the traditional differences and synthesized, embraced their characteristics into one cohesive piece. The pathos, on the other hand, is the most obvious. Interestingly enough, we mentioned that there are no words spoken in the context of video, all of the emotions are coming from those animated characters; they share anger, happiness and some anxiety. Specifically, little girl is angry because the “Superflat” Panda monster picked up her cellphone and wouldn’t return it; she is happy because the magic world between Louis Vuitton and Murakami is pretty and everything seems dashing; it brings out the anxiety of reality check for the school girl when she is teleported back to the street after her adventure. However, the anxiety can be transferred to the audience who watch this short film. Preciously, the little girl’s experience triggers the anxiety of real world audience to purchase the collaborated product simply because customers might want to experience the luxurious goods shown in this creatively constructed form of animation/pop art. Lastly, the couple odd moments can be consider as logos of the video since some of the incident does not follow the general audience’s expectation. We call it “Murakami” logic, It all starts when the “Superflat” monster eats the girl (transforming her into another world). However, the strange use of logos is making sense in the context of this artifact because Murakami’s genius setting of animation film rather than real film contributes to the video as a whole, as a gateway of introducing the magic world of “Superflat Monogram”.
Not only is Murakami able to persuade his audience to believe in this metaphor by his great use of “Murakami logic”, persuasive emotion and characteristics from both inside and outside of the video, but also, in terms of a narrative criticism, Murakami is a great storyteller in that he constructs a great layout for audience to grab the centurial theme of magical experience. His short films have a great sense of narrative “adherence. The reading conjunction between Coleman and Foss offers a new method to criticize and analyze artifacts; they offered the theory from Fisher and Burke, called narrative approach (criticism). Among three different types of narrative approach, Burke’s ratio-narrative approach, also known as the pentadic criticism, primarily focuses on the crucial elements within the artifact itself. Murakami’s work can be best analyzed in five dramatic elements mentioned by Burke:

     Act: dashing adventure through Louis Vuitton and world of “Superflat”.

     Agent: “Superflat” animation character, Panda monster, elfin-like angel, little girl

     Agency: cellphone

     Scene: busy Street of Tokyo and “Superflat Monogram” space

     Purpose:  little girl retrieves her cellphone while experiencing an adventure.

As Burke mentioned in the process of crafting analysis, there are 20 different systematic pairings for ratios that are crossed in between these five primary terms.  In this case, Takashi Murakami and Louis Vuitton focused mostly in act, scene, agent and agency. When we focus on agent-scene, the relationship between these two terms are in a cause-effect relationship, Murakami employed his “Superflat” character in an artistic real Tokyo setting, agent enabled him to transform the scene later on, into the world of “Superflat x Louis Vuitton”. Meanwhile, agent-scene also offers a platform to further introduce the act. The scene-act relation also impacts one another because of the scene that Murakami creates he is able to initiate the act in the video, which is the dashing, adventurous experience. Lastly, agency-scene worked together to create the advertisement image, because the agency is cellphone, the video is able to use cellphone as a device to trigger the audience into the adventure scene, it formed a familiarity for the audience to keep the object matter in mind so that everything else makes more sense. Here, both Murakami and Louis Vuitton insert their symbolic image into it and make the most aesthetic appeal out of the video.

The five elements from Kenneth Burke not only worked with each other, but also ensured the narrative probability and fidelity as Fisher mentioned in his essay regarding the two tenets narrative “adherence.". This artifact/video has Murakami’s animation theory and genre, it can be taken into any context, and he kept a consistency within this video in comparison to his other artwork. The narrative probability of this artifact “makes sense” because of his consistency throughout it remaining as “Murakami logic” rather than everyday logic. Although the classical and pendatic approach did not mention too much about metaphor itself, the major argument of this paper is still concerned that Murakami, as a rhetor developed this metaphor of: Louis Vuitton is like a refined art piece in world of animation, it is worthy to buy. The classical and pendatic approach is used as an analytical tool to demonstrate why this metaphor worked.

As we dive into the study of metaphor, the subfield of metaphor simile concerned the fact that the comparison is explicit. By containing the world “like” in the metaphor itself. However, if we look into this simile more closely, it is not the fact that Louis Vuitton and Murakami’s animation really are alike, but rather, He applied the method, as we referred to Ideological critique. Murakami’s work in this particular video fits with two terms that Stoner and Perkin argued, this rhetorical critique method: culture hegemony result in a marginalization and the application of legitimization. The Japanese pop culture is reflected in every inch of the video, which offered a platform for the audience to connect, whether it is the busy, chaotic street of Tokyo or the classic flip-style cellphone used in 90s, they are the dominant elements that the audience around the world relates to in their unique culture identification.      
Above all, the art form itself, further exemplifies this iconic Japanese pop culture. However, as a part of the collaboration, Louis Vuitton: a high-end fashion brand appeared less culturally dominant in the video, they just solely provide the logo. In other words, Louis Vuitton’s own culture had been marginalized because of this unique animation form and the way they present their products. But still, Louis Vuitton is the main participant of the collaboration regardless of this imbalance. There are many odd moments in the video that will never make sense without knowledge of Murakami’s “Superflat” theory; he is able to legitimize those odd moments with his creation of “Superflat” characters. The logic behind this legitimization is that he quietly set up the assumption that humans are not animated characters and they are not prone to “crime” like eating one’s cellphone and the girl. People tend to ignore and forget the real world ideology and implicitly agree with Murakami’s ideology as audiences enjoy the video. As previous analysis has argued, he had almost perfect ethos, pathos and logos yet the narrative made sense and was persuasive to the audience, he is able to insert these ideologies to ensure this dashing experience both inside and outside of the video: audiences enjoy the video itself and also willing to purchase the collaborative product.

Lastly, we focus our attention on the Murakami use of icon. The definition of the conceptual oriented criticism is “focused on drawing from case studies to ‘take in’ more meaning for a given concept” (McKerrow & St. John). The interpretation of this concept “icon” can be understood as something that stands out in the video that is illustrated by images, yet those images are comparable to our preconception. In other words, the manipulation of all the different unique elements really showed off in within the image of the video rather than the storyline or content. What makes this video iconic is the fact that it developed a contrast between what we expect and what we actually experience when two different subjects collide with each other. As Jacobs puts it, “we approached the idea of the ‘icons’ of Takashi and the ‘icons’ of Louis Vuitton, being the monogram, and we worked on creating a brand new canvas that had the spirit and presence of Takashi and the history of Vuitton” (Kwon p.47).

The main contrast between Louis Vuitton and Takashi Murakami is that they are totally differently categorized. Takashi Murakami is a contemporary Japanese pop artist that based his creation in the form of animation, no matter the sculpture, painting or other kind of art, he remains consistent on presenting it with his animation rather than any other art form; Louis Vuitton, a high-end French born brand is focused on luxurious products such as luggage, handbags with their high price and recognizable logos.

If people are still not able to associate commonplace established for these two different brands, consider the collaboration film, Murakami is able to create sets of new images to intertwine the differences and challenge our preconceptions. Specifically, Murakami abandoned the traditional approach to advertisements of the fashion industry, he didn’t hire some photographer along with some skinny tall model to sell their collaboration product, in which, audiences think traditionally as we mentioned in the beginning. Same case with Murakami’s animation, we thought the best the collaboration can do is perhaps have Murakami draw a Louis Vuitton bag to put on his “Superflat” animation character. However, the film proved us all wrong. During the collaboration video, he only uses the Louis Vuitton iconic “LV” logo. He put the logo in the background of “Superflat” experience and often zooms in – a LV hand grabbing the girl’s cellphone, and zooms out again to reinforce those movements when audience see the logos. He is able to give vivid color into the logo so that it does not look plain and boring as in previous advertisements, it is actually the first time someone has tried to insert some colors into the traditional luxury logos. Besides the logo, Murakami still is able to retain his artistic insight and keep animation as a platform to offer this collaboration film. Murakami created the animal Panda to indicate his product of collaboration; Panda inherited other “Superflat” animation characteristics. However, it only appeared on the Louis Vuitton product rather than sold as an individual artwork. Even though the collaboration film is not saying commerce explicitly, the film is targeted heavily on the customer/viewer eyepiece rather than a piece of art with no objective.

To finally evaluate and prove the success of this metaphor/collaboration, we carefully examine the audience reception from several sources. First, the article from Harvard Business Review “Louis Vuitton in Japan” by Justin Paul and Charlotte Feroul confirmed the success of this collaboration. They mentioned, “Takashi Murakami had result in smash hits, boosting Louis Vuitton’s sales in the market” (Paul p.14), “The strategy appeared to be a huge success for the leading luxury conglomerate LVMH, as the Murakami line increased Louis Vuitton’s profits by 10 percent” (Paul p.11). The research exhibit demonstrated that two of six of Louis Vuitton’s bestselling handbags in Japan were designed by Murakami (Paul p.20). Second, just simply focus on the Japanese market, the book by Radha Chadha and Paul Husband examine the Asian’s love affair with luxury product, they said “a staggering 94 percent of Tokyo women in their 20s own a Louis Vuitton piece”, more interestingly, “for Louis Vuitton, the undisputed leader of the cults, it’s possibly a case of too much love – at one point an estimated 88 percent of Vuitton’s global sales came from Japanese consumers”(Chadha p.2). In another article where Japanese scholar Shin’ya Nagasawa mentioned, “based on data published in Luxury Import Brand Market in Japan 2008(Yano Research Institute Ltd. 2008), 6 years after the collaboration production, Louis Vuitton held the top spot for net sales of single brands for FY 2007 with sales of around 165.0 billion yen” (Nagasawa p.17), it is approximately 1.762 billion U.S dollar today; yet that is almost six years ago from today. Just a quick look at Murakami’s product as well, Thomas Loose in his article “Superflat and the Layers of Image and History in 1990s Japan”, he points out that “Murakami constantly refers to his refusal of any distinction between art and commodity, and part of his aim is simply to sell a lot (and he does, with annual sales in the billion of U.S. dollars)” (Loose p.95).

Murakami has often being referred as the “Asian” Andy Warhol, as Hebdige mentioned in the collection book “Murakami”, he said, “both Warhol and Murakami gained attention in the art world by positioning themselves as outsider-savants not so much hostile as oblivious to the boundary-making rituals and etiquettes that continue to protect institutionally sanctioned contemporary art from contamination by other forms of production and exchange. Both are seen as radical levelers… art/commodity, art-world/fashionista hierarchies. Both appropriated business as an art form and adopted cooperate branding strategies ” (Hebdige p.20).

Followed by the success of the collaboration, Murakami is not the only artist who collaborated with Louis Vuitton. Just earlier last year, Louis Vuitton collaborate with another legendary contemporary Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, it was a huge hit again since the Kusama style is rapidly different than Murakami’s animation, as Marc Jacobs refer to be the “ her hand paint Speedy bag” (Jacobs 0:20) and “polka dot would eventually meet Monogram” (Jacobs line 2). In the future, it would be great to look at this collaboration in a rhetorical lens. As for now, upon finish discuss this artifact, we should have a comprehensive understanding on this big metaphor between Takashi Murakami and Louis Vuitton.

References

Murakami, Takashi. "Superflat Monogram." YouTube. YouTube, 15 Feb. 2010. Web. 07 Feb. 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwmsXEncv-0>

Paul, J., & Feroul, C. (2010). Louis Vuitton in Japan. London, Ontario, Canada.

Chadha, R., & Husband, P. (2006). The cult of the luxury brand: Inside Asia's love affair with luxury. London: Nicholas Brealey International.

BBC. "Takashi Murakami – Birth of Superflat." YouTube. YouTube, 08 Mar. 2011. Web. 07 Feb. 2013. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SE2VgKy5DUc>.

Nagasawa, S. Y. (2008). Marketing Principles of Louis Vuitton-The Strongest Brand Strategy.

Looser, T. D. (January 27, 2010). Superflat and the Layers of Image and History in 1990s Japan. Mechademia, 1, 1, 92-109.

Kwon, Marci. "Modern Art Asia Issue 1: Japan, Modern Art, and Tradition [Edição Kindle]." Modern Art Asia Issue 1: Japan, Modern Art, and Tradition EBook: Majella Munro, Gwyn Helverson, Marci Kwon, Yayoi Shionoiri, Ming Turner, Asato Ikeda, Laura Warne, Kristina Kleutghen: Amazon.com.br: Loja Kindle. ModernArtAsia.com, 2009. Web. 18 Mar. 2013. <http://www.amazon.com.br/Modern-Art-Asia-Issue-ebook/dp/B008QI6HG4>.

Murakami, Takashi, Paul Schimmel, and Dick Hebdige. © Murakami. Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007. Print.

Jacobs, Marc. "Behind the Collaboration with Kusama." Louis Vuitton, 27 July 2012. Web. 19 Mar. 2013. <http://www.louisvuitton.com/front/#/eng_US/New-Now/articles/Behind-the-Collaboration-with-Kusama>.