Luxury fashion houses, jewelers and automakers have been targeting China more often, including China-only limited editions. The latest of these is from Absolut, which collaborated with the Chinese pop artist Gao Yu on an edition of 350,000 bottles that will become available in China this August.
Absolut’s Gao Yu-designed “72变” (72 bian, or “72 transformations”) bottles display a compelling mixture of ancient Chinese culture and the contemporary renaissance most clearly visible in cities like Shanghai and Beijing. Yu’s bottle design features a heavily stylized illustration of Sun Wukong — better known outside of China as “The Monkey King” from the epic Chinese novel Journey to the West — and the “72 transformations” of which Sun is capable are alluded to in the edition’s name.