Louis Vuitton Vintage Trunk / Slawn — Rubi Rose Project

This vintage Louis Vuitton trunk was painted by London-based Nigerian artist Olaolu Slawn in 2023 and used within his collaborative project with American rapper and model Rubi Rose. A surviving private-sale record identifies the object as a unique Slawn-modified Louis Vuitton trunk, accompanied by its protective Louis Vuitton cover and connected directly to the Rubi Rose project.

The collaboration itself developed around the idea of the body as a surface for painting. Slawn’s own project archive states that his work with Rose took inspiration from Keith Haring and Grace Jones’s 1984 body-painting collaboration. In December 2023, Slawn painted directly onto Rose’s body in London, covering her with black graphic marks before the resulting photographs circulated publicly. Contemporary reporting records Rose describing the project as “rubirose by slawn – lundun23”.

The trunk belongs to the same broader period in which Slawn was progressively removing distinctions between conventional paintings and the objects on which he worked. Cars, buses, aircraft, watches, clothing and people all became potential surfaces. Artsy later described this tendency directly, noting Slawn’s willingness to treat almost anything as a canvas, from vehicles to the human body.

That makes the use of a Louis Vuitton trunk particularly resonant. Trunk-making sits at the foundation of Louis Vuitton’s identity: Louis Vuitton began as a professional packer and trunk maker before opening his own business in Paris in 1854, and the house’s development of flat-topped, stackable luggage became central to its early reputation. Its later Monogram canvas, introduced in 1896, turned the exterior surface of the trunk into one of the most recognisable branding systems in luxury.

Slawn’s intervention effectively reverses part of that logic. Instead of treating the monogrammed surface as something finished and protected, it becomes another ground on which to draw. The value of the underlying Louis Vuitton object remains legible, but the artist’s marks interrupt the visual authority normally associated with the house. As with his treatment of bodies and vehicles, the interest lies partly in the refusal to distinguish between an established luxury object and any other available surface.

The chronology is also important. This trunk dates to 2023, before Slawn’s later documented Stolen Bag Collection with Louis Vuitton in 2024. Saatchi Yates lists that later project specifically as a collaboration with Louis Vuitton. The Rubi Rose trunk should therefore not be retroactively described as “Louis Vuitton x Slawn” in the institutional sense simply because Slawn later worked officially with the house.

The Rubi Rose collaboration itself subsequently generated a wider body of work. Unique hand-embellished photographic works from the project have entered the gallery market, including examples handled by D’Stassi Art and recorded on Artsy. Those works preserve the body-painting performance as photographs subsequently altered by Slawn, extending a moment originally centred on the painted body into collectible physical objects.

The trunk occupies a related but different position. It is simultaneously a pre-existing luxury collectible, a functional travel object and an artist-painted artefact associated with a specific creative project. A private-sale listing describes it as a one-of-one work, although no separate artist-issued edition documentation has been identified publicly. The Archive therefore treats it as a unique documented object while distinguishing that from a formally published edition statement.

Disndat nevertheless retained an interest in the object because of what it represented. It sat at the intersection of an established luxury house, an artist whose practice deliberately moved between art, street culture and everyday objects, and a moment in which a temporary creative project generated a singular physical artefact. Its place in the Archive therefore comes from observation and market exposure rather than ownership.