If you’re a designer bag lover, consider this your trigger warning. What you’re about to see and hear about may be very, verypainful. Still with me? Okay, let’s just get this out in the open then: Artist Illma Gore destroyed 24 Louis Vuitton bags, collectively valued at $15,000, to make a monogrammed toilet for Tradesy.
That’s right, a Louis Vuitton toilet. And if you happen to be in the vicinity of the designer reseller’s Santa Monica showroom, you can even go flush it yourself.
The so-called “Loo-uisVuitton Toilet”, which Gore tells Vogue has never actually been used (though apparently “many have offered”), is on sale for $100,000. For that amount of money, you could have a whole set of LV luggage and probably even some ready-to-wear too. But isn’t doing your business on a bunch of designerbags a priceless experience? I think so.
While bathrooms probably aren’t the first thing that come to mind when you think about six-figure art investments,Gore is actually far from the first artist to turn the humble toilet into a critique of capitalist excess. The Guggenheim Museum recently played host to Maurizio Cattelan’s 18-karat gold throne,while Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a porcelain urinal adapted into art in 1917, remains one of the most significant, groundbreaking works in modern art history.
In an Instagram post that’s been liked almost 3,000 times,Gore explained the project concisely: “I wondered what 15k of authentic@louisvuittonbags looked like as a fully functional toilet, so I made this. ” But knowing her subversive body of work, which includes a nude portrait of Donald Trump and a painting of Brock Turner as Rosie the Riveter, there’s a bit more to it than that. After all, why destroy all those beautiful bags if not to make a serious statement?
If you’d rather see your LV intact instead of in toilet form, check out images from the brand’s “Volex VoguezVoyagez” exhibition, currently on view in New York.