Twisted Sister?

Louis Vuitton's Spring/Summer collection left me shaking my head. Surely, I thought, surely I must be missing something (anything)...this cannot be as bad as it appears at first glance. Hoping to gain some insight I scanned the reviews and learned that this was another of Jacobs' collaborations with artists...though, after Sprouse and Murakami, I have to wonder if this is a case of third time not being a charm. The artist in this instance was Richard Prince who, I'm ashamed to say, I had never heard of before I read the reviews. But thanks to the joys of the world wide web I uncovered a very interesting article from 2003 on Slate's website...which includes such wonderful one-liners as "Prince's nurses are ciphers of femininity: accessible yet forbidden, wholesome yet on intimate terms with strangers' bodily fluids." But to continue...

The paragraph that I found most illuminating when taken alongside the Vuitton collection was that "there's certainly nothing new about the fetishization of nurses. The naughty nurse is one of those deeply ingrained stereotypes that just keeps surfacing—on soap operas, on Halloween, in the pages of glossy fashion magazines. But are they what we expect from Richard Prince, an artist best known for his sophisticated critiques of the insidious myths of American consumer culture? Are these paintings ironic appropriations meant to deconstruct a regressive stereotype? Or has an element of sheer pleasure snuck into the irony?".

So, was this intended as hit-them-over-the-head irony, to have an artist known for "critiquing the myths of consumer culture" create cartoon handbags that, at a minimum, must be going to retail for $5,000? If so, guess who gets the last laugh? It certainly won't be the women with the bags...or Spongebob Squarepants.