Art Couture

by Chris Schmidt

Art and fashion have often been wary bedfellows. But this spring is all about designer-artist collaborations -- some real, some inspirational.

The season's most coveted accessory is Louis Vuitton's limited-edition white leather bag, designed in collaboration with Japanese artist Takashi Murakami. The bag, which retails for $499 to $4,000, features the house's signature monogram interspersed with candy-colored cherry blossoms and cartoon-cute space creatures drawn by Mr. Murakami. (Just in time to replace the last LVMH must-have that's now so over: the Vuitton logo bags covered with graffiti by '80s fashion designer Stephen Sprouse.)

Vuitton's wait list for the handbag stretches about 3,000 people long, so your best bet for getting hold of it might be eBay -- where one recently went for $1,575.

And bad-boy artist Damien Hirst and cobbler Manolo Blahnik recently teamed up to create a very limited edition white highheeled ankle boot covered with Mr. Hirst's signature jewel-colored polka dots. Eleven pairs were made, and sold for $1,200 each at Bergdorf Goodman at a recent event for the New Museum. (One pair was bought by Harold Koda of the Met Costume Institute.)

Still, there are plenty of relatively accessible and affordable accessories that pick up where Mr. Hirst and Mr. Blahnik leave off. Fellow Brit Alexander Mc-Queen may not have collaborated with Mr. Hirst, but he seems to have caught the Hirst bug. For his Spring 2003 Ready to Wear show, he sent models down the runway wearing chartreuse snakeskin shoes with transparent Lucite wedge heels with real butterflies embedded in 14 th St.) Mr. Hirst, you'll recall, is the artist who encased a vivisected cow in glass cases filled with formaldehyde; in one of his less outre works, he caught live butterflies on the surface of freshly painted canvases.

In a nod to her '80s East Village roots, "Sex and the City" stylist Patricia Field has created handbags and ruffled miniskirts for her way) that are layered with old-school graffiti -- think '80s art-stars Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. Let's just hope Ms. Field's revival is more successful than the musical "Radiant Baby," based on Haring's life, which recently flopped at the Public Theater.

Of course, the whole concept of art and fashion began with Andy Warhol, who was so enamored of the fashion runway that in the '80s he listed himself as a model with the Zoli modeling agency. In an homage to the artist, Londonbased milliner Philip Treacy has plastered facsimiles of Warhol's silkscreen portraits of Marilyn Monroe, Liza Minnelli, and Elizabeth Taylor on bucket hats, bags, and pocketbooks.

Warhol, ever the populist, would have loved to see his works walking down the street -- though he might not have worn them. "It's hard if you have an ordinary face to pull off one of these hats," Warhol biographer Wayne Koestenbaum says. "Your own face should be better looking than the one you're wearing."