Trompe l'oeil bags aren't anything new for Louis Vuitton but $4,000 handbags intended to resemble plastic freezer bags? Okay, that's something new.
Louis Vuitton's appropriately named Freezer Handle Soft Trunk and Freezer Sac Plat do just that, though they're disguised as comparatively conventional LV bags.
Though they're shaped like an ordinary reusable freezer bag, Louis Vuitton's new men's bags look all the world like a see-through plastic bag that holds an ordinary LV handbag inside. It's a bizarre effect that's impressively convincing in photographs.
Don't be fooled, though: LV's Freezer bags ain't some cheap gimmick. Each is entirely made of silver-coated leather interrupted only by LV's signature monogrammed canvas, 3D cowhide leather straps, and the photo-realistic still life props.
What's even wilder is that these bizarre bags actually cost as much or more than the Louis Vuitton bags that they mimic.
The Freezer Soft Trunk retails for $3,700 on Louis Vuitton's website, the same price as an ordinary Handle Soft Trunk. The Freezer Sac Plat, meanwhile, is priced at $3,950, over $1,300 more than the Sac Plat PM bag.
Perhaps LV is riffing on the indie designers who've taken to selling totes printed with photographs of luxury handbags, which would make these bags a proper bootleg ouroboros, an imitation of an imitation.
Talk about being committed to the bit. Ceci n'est pas une Louis Vuitton bag.
Note that Louis Vuitton's recently-appointed menswear head, Pharrell Williams, had nothing to do with the Freezer bags, though they do smack of the post-Virgil self-awareness that runs through Williams' debut LV collection.
Indeed, they're actually part of the LV Fall 2023 collection overseen by Kidsuper's Colm Dillane.
Still, bags are, obviously, a huge part of Pharrell's LV (especially really expensive ones), though the focus is more on popping color. Pharrell and his team cooked up more than a few shapely gimmick bags, too.
Even compared to Pharrell's craziest creations, though, Louis Vuitton's Freezer bags are especially out-there, even in the grand scheme of imitative bags.
What's harder to swallow: a nearly $4k "plastic" bag or a $2k brown bag?
