This 2013 autumn/winter season will mark the first time that Louis Vuitton manufactures a product designed by an artist from the Middle East. 

 

As part of it's autumn/winter Foulard D'artistes ('Artists' Scarves') project, fashion powerhouse Louis Vuitton will adopt designs by three international street artists: Eko Nughoro from Indonesia, EINE from the UK and El-Seed from Tunisia, on it's emblematic giant silk square.  

 

El-Seed is a Tunisian-born visual artist who paints large-scale murals of decorative Arabic script, in a style he describes as "caligrafitti". He has painted bright murals in cities across the globe, from New York to Mecca to his Tunisian hometown Gabes.

 

El-Seed first explored the art of graffiti in 1998 in Paris, where he spent his childhood. Later, when he moved to North America, he started combining graffiti with his passion for Arabic calligraphy (usually associated with the Quran and religious scripture). The artist likes to mix traditional script and contemporary pop-culture, giving birth to a distinctive urban graffiti.  

 

On his rendetition of the Louis Vuitton scarf, El-Seed illustrated four verses from a poem dubbed "Venice Carnival" by late Palestinian writer Taha Muhammad Ali.

 

"I gave an homage to Venice, Italy through a few verses from poet Taha Muhammad Ali, a tribute to the beauty and elegance of this city and it's openness to the Eastern world," the artist announced on Facebook.

 

"Inspired by Arabic calligraphy, El-Seed imagines the graceful swirls of this ancestral art overlaying the Monogram pattern," reads the Louis Vuitton press release. "One half of the design is printed in fuchsia, while the other is covered with a discreet filigree that reveals, rather than conceals, Louis Vuitton's iconic motif."