From Superflat Windows to Facebook Walls: Mobility and Multiplicity of an Animated Shopping Gaze

In April 2009, Louis Vuitton released a new project with Takashi Murakami. The million-dollar collaboration between the French luxury brand and the Japanese artist produced a new collection of leather goods designed by Murakami, as well as a short animated video titled Superflat First Love. The romance story in this “first love” features a multicolor Panda who guides a teenage Japanese girl through a flood of LV monograms to meet young Louis Vuitton in the nineteenth-century France. Despite the title, Superflat First Love (2009) is actually the sequel to Murakami’s 2003 video, Superflat Monogram, which, in a similar animation style, features the same cute Panda with big staring eyes, swimming in an ocean of the brand’s multicolor monograms. And the moving images of both animated videos are deliberately flat, depthless, and floating, the signature visual style of what Takashi Murakami has famously defined and promoted as superflat.

Many have celebrated the distinctive visual sensibility of superflat art, which claims to be informed by Japanese visual cultures such as manga and anime, as a unique challenge to Western visual tradition of Renaissance perspective.¹ However, Murakami’s superflat campaign for Louis Vuitton, as it turns out, is not alone in its fetishization of the luxury brand’s graphic trademarks with a depthless visual field. A simple Google search yields countless user-created Louis Vuitton desktops, wallpapers, screensavers, and even a Louis Vuitton Facebook layout. These graphics, like Murakami’s superflat art, all take the brand’s now-iconic multicolor monograms as the visual cue for a deliberately flat surface. Unlike Murakami’s, however, these depthless images are not for printed leather goods or video projectors but are for the screens of your personal computers. As a fashion blogger accurately commented: “Who needs skin, skateboards, or automobile bumpers when you can express your identity—or your brand obsession—by decorating your laptop?” ² And “this paradoxical combination of individuality and corporate conformity,” the blogger goes on, “works on any screen.” Indeed, such a depthless image with overflowing Louis Vuitton icons, like Murakami’s superflat art, is the ideal format for any screen, from television to computer, from iPhone to iPad, whose ever flattened and enlarging surfaces are saturating our entire visual environment in this postcinematic age of the so-called media convergence.

What is more stunning about these depthless images is not just their ubiquity but their unnerving combination of personal identity with brand-name commodity or, to borrow that blogger’s words, the “paradoxical combination of individuality and corporate conformity.” ³ When such combination is articulated through a flattened visual field, combination becomes equation and interchangeability. In Murakami’s superflat videos for Louis Vuitton, the brand’s monograms are not just floating on the surface around the two-dimensional cartoon Panda but are also printed on its caricature body (Figure 1). This animated character is not just a consumer of the brand—it is the brand itself. And this cartoon Panda, with its staring, engaging eyes, as well as its smiling, posing, and camera-ready face (it poses for cellphone cameras on several occasions), is strikingly reminiscent of an anonymous female face that I encountered on the demo of the Louis Vuitton Facebook layout. That girl’s face, like Murakami’s Panda, smiling and self-displaying, floats on a flat surface saturated with Louis Vuitton monograms, and that surface is metaphorically—and aptly—defined by Facebook as the “wall.” If the Facebook wall, as is marketed by this world-leading social network, is an articulation of your personal identity, then that wall in this case has nothing other than the abundance of a luxury icon.

Such flattened interchangeability between identity and commodity, between Facebook names and brand names, articulated through a depthless visual mode called “superflat,” evokes my questions in this essay. Since when, and how, have our individual identities become tie-in products of the brands we consume? And what are the roles of our changing modes of visual perception, as well as subject formation, that are being played here informing, or informed...