Uniqlo and a Paris Design Agency’s Splashy New T-Shirts for the Louvre Aim to Avoid an ‘Obvious Representation’ of History

The Louvre in Paris has once again partnered up with Uniqlo to create a new line of t-shirts featuring fragments of writing taken from works in the museum’s collection. Known as “The Scripts of the Louvre,” the collection will be released on May 8.

The idea for the one-off line was dreamt up by M/M (Paris), a design agency founded by Michaël Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak in 1992.

Their chosen inscriptions have come from across all nine of the Louvre’s departments, spanning all of history from some of the earliest documented writing by humans during the third millennium B.C. to the French Baroque painter Poussin’s signature. They will be accompanied by a new logo for the Louvre in M/M’s original typography.

“We are very excited about this collection which gives visitors the opportunity to think beyond the obvious representation of the past and offers a mixture of art, design, and fashion in a way that transcends space, time and culture,” read a statement from M/M.

Some of the t-shirts will also feature a character recurrent throughout M/M’s working know as The Agent, appearing here as an inverted image of the Mona Lisa sitting atop I.M. Pei’s famous pyramid, which is installed in the Louvre’s courtyard. Posters bearing the same designs will be publicly displayed through the museum.

The Grand Palais will also offer a series of new products based on the same design. These will be typical gift shop fare, including stationery, tote bags, mugs, snow globes, puzzles, and candles.

Uniqlo and the Louvre announced a four-year partnership in 2021, with a plan to invite new artist and designers to give a fresh take on the museum’s collection each year. Previous collaborations between the Japanese fashion retailer and the Paris museum have included a series of cartoon-style drawings of classic artworks by Japanese artist Yu Nagaba in 2022 and another reinterpretation of the works based on their accession numbers by British graphic designer Peter Saville in 2021.