Evian Marks 200 Years With Jeff Koons Balloon Dog Bottles
A clear glass bottle, a silver ribbon, and a familiar silhouette: Evian is celebrating its 200th anniversary with a limited-edition collaboration featuring American artist Jeff Koons (b. 1955), alongside a roster of athletes that includes tennis stars Carlos Alcaraz, Emma Raducanu, and Francis Tiafoe, plus golfer Céline Boutier.
The commemorative bottles come in two versions — still and sparkling — each using Koons’s instantly legible Balloon Dog imagery. The still bottle is finished with a pink cap and a picture of a stainless-steel pink balloon dog; the sparkling bottle mirrors the design in blue. Both are wrapped with a silver ribbon, leaning into the gift-like logic of anniversary branding.
Evian’s origin story is unusually specific for a mass-market luxury staple. The water, filtered through glacial rocks in Évian-les-Bain in the French Alps, was discovered in 1789. It was first bottled in 1826 by the King of Piedmont-Sardinia — a date the brand now treats as its founding marker, and the basis for this year’s bicentennial.
Koons’s Balloon Dog sculptures, which stand roughly 12 feet tall, first appeared in the mid-1990s as part of his “Celebration” series, a body of work that translated party favors and childhood ephemera into monumental, mirror-finished objects. The motif has circulated in multiple colors — including pink and blue, echoed on the Evian bottles, as well as yellow, orange, and red — and has become one of the most recognizable forms in the contemporary art marketplace.
That market visibility has been reinforced by auction history. In 2013, an orange Balloon Dog sold for $58.4 million at Christie’s, setting a record at the time for the most expensive work by a living artist.
In a statement accompanying the release, Koons framed the choice as a meeting of icons. “I chose to incorporate my iconic Balloon Dog in the design because it not only resonates with the brand’s own iconic status,” he said, “but is also directly related to this celebratory, optimistic — and I believe life-giving — moment.”
For Evian, the partnership extends a long-running strategy of cultural collaborations that began in 2007 and has largely centered on fashion. Past contributors have included Christian Lacroix, Diane von Furstenberg, Alexander Wang, and Balmain. In 2019, Virgil Abloh designed an Evian bottle; that same year, his exhibition “Figures of Speech” opened at MCA Chicago before embarking on a lengthy tour.
Koons appears to be the first visual artist to join Evian’s roster, a shift that underscores how brand collaborations increasingly borrow the language of contemporary art — not just to decorate a product, but to attach it to a recognizable authorship and a ready-made mythology. In this case, the mythology is as polished as Koons’s steel surfaces: celebration, optimism, and a bottle designed to be kept long after the water is gone.
