Sandra‘s Closet

At the WWD Art Gala in Seoul, I had the pleasure to sit next to Mike Winkelmann a.k.a. Beeple, digital artist and graphic designer, that you should definitely know. Based in Charleston, SC, USA, he does a variety of digital artwork including short films, Creative Commons VJ loops, everydays and VR / AR work. After he began releasing a set of widely used Creative Commons VJ loops he has worked on concert visuals for Justin Bieber, One Direction, Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Eminem, Zedd, deadmau5 and many more.

«BEEPLE is mike winkelmann
he makes a variety of art crap across a variety of media. some of it is ok, but a lot of it kind of blows ass. he’s working on making it suck less everyday though so bear with him… :)»

One of the originators of the current «everyday» movement in 3D graphics, he has been creating a picture everyday from start to finish and posting it online for over ten years without missing a single day. His Instagram account @beeple_crap is absolutely worth following – 2.3 million people would agree on that.

On 1 May 2007, he posted a new work of art online. He did the same thing the next day and the next, and the next one after that, creating and posting a brand-new digital picture, or «everyday» as he called it, every single day for 13-and-a-half years. Now those individual pieces have been brought together in EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, a unique work in the history of digital art. This monumental collage was the first purely digital artwork (NFT) ever offered at Christie’s. EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS sold online for $69,346,250.

Beeple (b. 1981), EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, 2021. Non-fungible token (jpg). 21,069 x 21,069 pixels (319,168,313 bytes). Minted on 16 February 2021. Sold for $69,346,250 in a single lot sale concurrently with First Open.

Beeple in Fashion

Apparently, Nicolas Ghesquière, Louis Vuitton Creative Director, was thinking of using some futuristic landscapes for the Maison’s S/S 2019 ready-to-wear collection. Florent Buonomano, Louis Vuitton Artistic Director, then initially approached Beeple after noticing his work on Instagram and brought several of his designs to the attention of Ghesquière. Nine of the «Everydays» pieces were selected and adapted on 13 of the 45 pieces being shown in the Louis Vuitton S/S 2019 collection, mainly on shirts, jackets, and dresses.

When the collection debuted during Paris Fashion Week at The Louvre Museum in Paris, Mike Winkelmann and his wife, with whom he is together since 15 years, attended the show and were impressed themselves to see the digital artwork on the clothing.

Mike Winkelmann has an amazing success story, but he is still down to earth,  and very easy to talk to. The guy from next door. Bravo!

Below you can find some of his recent works that I really love!

LoL, Sandra

He posted this right after the trip to Seoul: JETLAG

FAMILY

X IS COMING

WORLDCOIN

NEW COOL THING

Photos: © Sandra Bauknecht, © Louis Vuitton and © Beeple
DISCLOSURE: We may earn commission from links on this page, but I only recommend products I love. Promise!

The GO-14 bag is unique in Louis Vuitton’s history of leather goods. It is the nexus of entwined passions: a designer’s inspiration, a trunk-maker’s secrets, an artisan’s ingenuity… The GO-14 is both a commencement and a culmination.

The GO-14 is an initiatory bag, one of Nicolas Ghesquière’s first designs – hence its coded name: Ghesquière October 2014, the date it first appeared on the runway for the debut of the Women’s Artistic Director at Louis Vuitton. It is re-emerging in 2023 in full spirit with a unique characteristic: malletage.

The malletage brings in the spirit of historical trunk-making. This refined crisscrossing pattern pads the insides of trunks. The galon trim was a simple ingenuity that kept documents in their place regardless of the twists and turns of travelling.

Nicolas Ghesquière rediscovered this Louis Vuitton innovation and featured it in his first collection, reawakening and revealing this invisible luxury: «There are some universal codes that exist solely in Louis Vuitton. It was about reappropriating and transposing them into a new setting.» Nicolas Ghesquière turned it into a striking signature, a graphic design language for clothes and accessories. A narrative thread.

Today, the GO-14 is a generous, sensual padded lambskin bag. It is covered in this bouncy, infinitely soft malletage with overstitching highlighting the design’s curves and cushiony feel. It comes in every shade, from the starkest black and white to the diluted, nuanced, toasted shades that reveal the subtleties of its texture.

The GO-14 is a versatile bag that can be worn in many different ways to match every woman’s mood: on or over the shoulder with its new jewel chain as supple as a gold necklace; on the arm or handheld, as the chain can also be doubled thanks to a brand new groove system – like two precious commas. Finally, a handle reaffirms the bag’s position as a classic. The GO-14 exudes sophistication at all times.

The GO-14 is a feat of skill and the epitome of thriving heritage. The malletage that pads the bag – ever-evolving since the earliest trunks in a quest for enhancement and ultimate elegance – is a real challenge for artisans. The creative process requires more than 20 different steps, including the utmost meticulousness on the patina to ensure a satin or toasted finish and to perfect the colour’s subtle gradations.

A highly precise technique for depositing the 17-metre-long trim is also needed for the rounded malletage of each GO-14. A more complex savoir- faire than for traditional quilting is also paramount. GO-14’s perfect harmonies resonate with all the expertise of Louis Vuitton’s ateliers. Available from August 25, 2023.

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Louis Vuitton
DISCLOSURE: We may also earn commission from links on this page, but I only recommend products I love. Promise.

Unlocking the secrets behind French women’s style, the effortlessness, the attitude, the enigmatic and ever-so-coveted «je ne sais quoi». Simplicity is, apparently, key, as French women are never overdone or overdressed. It’s all about hyper-engineered minimalism, and by the way who said men’s shirts are only for men? Combine classic pieces in your wardrobe with something edgy, like breton stripes, a great pair of jeans with a cool sailor cap and you will feel like a true Parisian!

My look: Striped cardigan jacket with leather details, flared jeans in dark union wash twill, cropped boyfriend shirt in blue chambray, and Triomphe wool sailor cap, all by Celine, Mini Dauphine bag by Louis Vuitton, Le Loafer leather penny loafers by Saint Laurent, and polarized pilot sunglasses by CHANEL.

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Anouk Bauknecht / Sandra Bauknecht
DISCLOSURE: We may earn commission from links on this page, but I only recommend products I love. Promise.

Louis Vuitton opens an Editions Pop Up from 12th to 18th June at Art Basel, celebrating the Maison’s literary launches.

Following successful similar pop ups across the globe – from Venice to Shanghai and Dubai – this latest touchdown at Art Basel will be housed in Hall 1 of the world-renowned contemporary art fair, presenting a large array of works from Louis Vuitton’s Editions catalogue. The Maison’s pioneering publications of over one hundred titles – including the City Guide, Travel Books and Fashion Eye collections – explore travel, design, art and fashion. Each of these oeuvres call upon the talents of freelance journalists, experienced authors and cultural savants, to capture the essence of the subject or destination.

Open to visitors for the duration of Art Basel, this latest Louis Vuitton Editions pop will welcome painter and illustrator, Yann Kebbi, for an exclusive signing of his latest work for the Maison, the Travel Book Las Vegas. On site from 4pm to 5pm on the 13th and 14th June, Kebbi’s Travel Book will also be available in an exclusive «Artist Edition».

Louis Vuitton invites clients and visitors on a journey across the Maison’s literary works, from far off destinations to wide-ranging themes, all soon to be discovered in the heart of Art Basel.

Practical information:
Art Basel, Messe Basel
Messepl. 10
4058 Basel, Switzerland
Louis Vuitton Editions Pop Up from 12th to 18th June, in the entrance of Hall 1

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Louis Vuitton
We may earn commission from links on this page, but I only recommend products I love. Promise.

Last month, I took the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express from Paris to Vienna as guest of Louis Vuitton. Once I arrived in the Austrian capital, I visited the new Maison’s new store that has relocated to an expanded space on Graben in the heart of the city. Occupying four floors of a historic building, this new store presents the Louis Vuitton universe within a beautiful Viennese backdrop.

The store is the latest realisation of the design concept developed by Peter Marino for locations such as New Bond Street, Los Angeles and Ginza. Among the largest in Europe, it benefits from Vienna’s status as a dynamic cultural destination and a nexus for travel.

Designed by Max Kröpf, Oskar Laske and Viktor Fiala, the building dates to 1898-99. Its listed façade is ornamented with reliefs depicting long-distance trade and coats of arms from such cities as Hamburg, Trieste and London.

A spacious layout showcases the full Louis Vuitton offer and Peter Marino signatures, including striking art, objects and furniture that correspond with the design heritage of Vienna. Defined by curving walls and open sightlines, the store is organised around an exceptional staircase that unfurls with floating steps in four tonal varieties of stone. At once sculptural and a means of circulation, it is juxtaposed with a statement wall, panelled in commissioned works by well-known Austrian artist, Erwin Wurm. Bright and graphic, the eight paintings are composed of abstracted words: Form, Love, Body, Beauty and more.

As the history of Vienna is inextricably linked to its progressive movements in art and design, both figure significantly in the store’s expression. Notably, a pyramid of trunks has been hand-painted in the spirit of Gustav Klimt and other artists of the Vienna Secession. Vintage extends to contemporary – from an Alvar Aalto daybed and a Carl Malmsten modular sofa to Matt Gagnon’s Custom Light Stacks and Fernando Daza’s Four Intercepted Circles. With its flower-shaped bubbles, Atelier Biagetti’s Flower Tower lamp stands as a glass totem at once decorative and whimsical.

If you are in Vienna, this new store is a must-see, not only for the things to shop, but for its design!

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Sandra Bauknecht / © Louis Vuitton 
DISCLOSURE: We may earn commission from links on this page, but I only recommend products I love. Promise!

Now that you know all about the S/S 2023 bag trends, I put together for you a list to shop each trend immediately off the runway. Just click on the highlighted text to be transferred directly to the respective online shop. Enjoy!

LoL, Sandra

OVERSIZED BAG
Logo-plaque tote bag by Prada

WRISTLET
Pochette Clés XL by Louis Vuitton

BARBIECORE
Pink medium First bag by Fendi

PAILLETTES
Locò small sequinned-leather shoulder bag by Valentino

RED ALERT
Wanda crystal-embellished mini bag by Ferragamo

PUNK
Small Repeat shoulder bag by Versace

FORM FUNCTION
Denim peplum belt bag by Miu Miu

NOVELTY BAG
Inflatable-crab shoulder bag by Moschino

Photos: Courtesy of the Brands
DISCLOSURE: We may earn commission from links on this page, but I only recommend products I love. Promise.

Enjoy every moment… time flies. Here you see me celebrating my daughter’s 21st birthday in Boston at Contessa restaurant this month. We took the photos on beautiful Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay, next to my hotel The Newbury Boston, which often gets compared to Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s Paris boulevards. The street is home to many beautiful residential homes and is divided at center by a wide grassy mall. I enjoyed the warm spring weather in this beautiful Valentino knitwear look that features the iconic 1967 chain motif.

My look: Feather-trimmed jacquard-knit tunic, matching cropped feather-trimmed stretch jacquard-knit pants, Toile Iconographe pump in polymer and patent material, and VSLING mini top handle handbag in black with sparkling embroidery, all by Valentino, sunglasses by Louis Vuitton, Grand Apparat forever scarf 90 in crème/gold,/multicolore, scarf ring 90 Régate, bracelet Click H Hermès Factory in gold and lumière, and bracelet Click H in rose gold and marron glacé, all by Hermès.

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Sandra Bauknecht and © Hermès
DISCLOSURE: We may earn commission from links on this page, but I only recommend products I love. Promise!

A true demonstration of the craftsmanship and expertise of La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton, the two new Tambour Moon Flying Tourbillon «Poinçon de Genève» complete the colour palette of this exceptionally transparent family of watches.

This year, the watches, crafted from single blocks of synthetic sapphire, will come in fluorescent green or yellow cases. These transparent creations are true feats of technical and artistic know-how, the first of their kind in the history of watchmaking to bear Geneva Seal. They herald a new era, revealing all the secrets of their skilfully openwork Manufacture movement driven by a flying tourbillon.

There is great potential in using cases cut from a block of coloured synthetic sapphire. This pure and precious mineral is obtained by heating aluminium oxide at temperatures of around 2000° Celsius. Ever since the early 20th century, when this manufacturing process was invented by French chemist Auguste Victor Louis Verneuil (1856-1913), the watch industry has been using it to produce rubies for mechanical movements. By dint of progress in its development during the 1980s, the industry succeeded in producing the first sapphire crystals for sports watches and, a decade later, the first complete cases.

Virtually unalterable like pure gold or platinum, with a hardness only surpassed by diamonds, synthetic sapphire is one of those precious materials over which time has no control. La Fabrique du Temps Louis Vuitton immediately grasped its potential, using it to protect the LV90 calibre from external stresses. It provides an impenetrable barrier to all but the eye and ensures that the exceptional openwork movement, regulated by a flying tourbillon, will have a virtually unlimited life span, provided that it receives regular care.

The Manufacture’s engineers have been experts in its application ever since the launch of the Tambour Moon Flying Tourbillon «Poinçon de Genève» watches in clear, blue and pink sapphire. This year, these artists, a bit of alchemists, have found the right formulas and the purest metal oxides in secretly guarded proportions.
They have created two new exceptional pieces with daringly translucent shades, so intense that they give the impression of being fluorescent. The first features an electric yellow sapphire case and the second comes in warm green accents.

To obtain a case middle, a case-back and a bridge bearing the LV logo in a strictly identical colour for each watch, a cylinder, 50 mm in diameter and 150 mm long, had to be extracted from the centre of a block of mass-tinted sapphire from Japan weighing nearly 200 kg. Each component is therefore cut from this sapphire crystal bar using diamond tools to obtain the pieces final dimensions. All the elements are then delicately polished to reveal their transparency and the richness of the two meticulously selected colours.

The entire synthetic sapphire case of each watch requires 420 hours of complex operations on digitally controlled machines working with diamond tools. The 10 mm thick monobloc part alone, comprising the case middle, the bezel and the glass, requires 100 hours of milling and 150 hours of polishing. The case back needs 50 hours of machining and 60 hours of hand and machine finishing to become fully transparent and ready for assembly. Finally, the transparent bridge bearing the LV logo takes 20 hours of cutting and 40 hours of manual finishing to let the light pass through flawlessly.

Constant and meticulous attention is given to every detail throughout the entire manufacturing process. The 12 letters forming LOUIS VUITTON are engraved on the outer side of the concave case middle of the Tambour Moon, which appeared in 2017. Like the indexes on the bezel flange, whose design gives the timepiece a very open face, they are delicately lacquered in white for the green sapphire version, and black for the yellow sapphire model. The two horns, in black PVD-treated titanium, are attached by screws. Finally, to protect the delicate movement from external stresses, this 42.5 mm case with a thickness of 9.9 mm is guaranteed water- resistant up to 30 metres. This is achieved via a transparent gasket positioned between the case middle and the screw-down case back.

Everything on this timepiece has been carefully considered, right down to the appearance of the hands, which are light and hollowed out, floating over the circles from which they seem to spring. Like the previous versions of the Tambour Moon Flying Tourbillon Sapphire, these two spectacularly light and transparent watches are, to date, the only models in the world to have a sapphire case and bear the Geneva Seal. Their sheer complexity means they are produced in very limited series every year.

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Louis Vuitton
DISCLOSURE: We may earn commission from links on this page, but I only recommend products I love. Promise!

«None of Louis Vuitton’s stores are designed to fit into the urban context in any conventional way… They are buildings designed to have the same appeal as the Maison’s products, elevated to civic scale.» − Paul Goldberger

An extensive exploration of Louis Vuitton’s façades—called the «skin» in architectural parlance—by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Paul Goldberger, Louis Vuitton Skin: The Architecture of Luxury takes readers on an exhilarating world tour of the Maison’s most distinctive stores. From São Paulo to Seoul, Miami to Mexico City, the book visits Louis Vuitton locations that collectively form what Goldberger calls «the most radical rethinking of the concept of brand identity in our time.»

Avoiding consistency, the French luxury house effectively invested not in a single architectural identity but rather in the notion of architecture itself as being Louis Vuitton’s identity. To that effect, the Maison has commissioned significant buildings, many by internationally renowned architects—including Frank Gehry, Jun Aoki and Peter Marino — with bespoke exteriors designed to create a powerful visual experience, relating to the specificities of its location, and above all, evoke emotions. Unequivocally modern, yet upholding Louis Vuitton’s unparalleled tradition of quality craftmanship, each store’s skin is constructed to have the same appeal as the Louis Vuitton products within it.

Undercutting the expectation that a vast luxury company must assert itself behind standardized visual codes, the Louis Vuitton stores highlighted in this book are each dramatically different urbanistic and architectural expressions, all unlike anything the Maison has previously designed. At the Istanbul Istinye Park location, for example, the exterior resembles a topographical map made from a three-dimensional printer, whereas in Tokyo’s Namiki Dori store, the glass façade references the nearby Tokyo Bay, with undulating surfaces that transmit shifting colors for a wave-like effect.

The book will be available in six different covers, each featuring one of Louis Vuitton’s most architecturally distinctive stores around the world: Beijing, Paris, Seoul, New York City, Tokyo and Singapore.

Paul Goldberger, whom the Huffington Post has called “the leading figure in architecturecriticism,” is currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. From 1997 through 2011, he served as the architecture critic for The New Yorker. He also holds the Joseph Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at the New School in New York City, where he was formerly dean of the Parsons School of Design. He began his career at The New York Times, where in 1984 his architecture criticism was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, the highest award in American journalism. Goldberger is also the author of several books, including Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Why Architecture Matters. In addition, he has served as a special consultant and adviser on architecture and planning matters to several major cultural and educational institutions, such as the Morgan Library Museum in New York, the New York Public Library and Harvard University.

Available in English or French for $160 – €160 – £120 from 14th April 2023.

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Louis Vuitton
DISCLOSURE: We may earn commission from links on this page, but I only recommend products I love. Promise!

Food for thought. You know that I have a thing for jovial accessories. Although I am not shopping in the men’s department in general, this one has definitely caught my eye. First seen on the Louis Vuitton S/S 2023 Paris Fashion Week runway, it is designed as a fun 2-in-1 accessory.

The collectible Fortune Cookie bag is made up of a cookie in calf leather, inside transparent packaging in PVC. Both pouches can be carried separately, the cookie with to its wristlet and the transparent pouch like a clutch. Inside each Fortune Cookie is a secret message, including one that reads, «Creativity listens to the heart,» as pictured in this post. Available in stores for $2310 / €1750.

It comes also as a Fortune Cookie Bag Charm & Key Holder for $ 585/ €445.

LoL, Sandra

Photos: © Louis Vuitton
DISCLOSURE: We may earn commission from links on this page, but I only recommend products I love. Promise.