Jacobs Honors Sprouse's Street Style

What better way to make a bold statement and honor the late legendary designer/artist Stephen Sprouse then by posing in the nude, painted in his graffiti?

Louis Vuitton creative director Marc Jacobs agreed - and he offered to put his body on display.

In honor of Sprouse, who died in 2004 at age 50, Jacobs appears in Harper's Bazaar's January issue (which hits newsstands Dec.16) sporting nothing but his birthday suit, silk-screened with the words Louis Vuitton in fuchsia paint all over his body with one of the new Vuitton bags covering up his unmentionables.

While in the buff, Jacobs also hopes to grab readers' attention and promote his new, limited edition collection of accessories and ready-to-wear based on his wildly popular collaboration with Sprouse in 2001.

"It's about taking something that's very iconic and revered and defacing it and creating something new, something rebellious, and kind of punk," Jacobs explained. "Cut from Marcel Duchamp to me going to see Charlotte Gainsbourg's apartment," he continued. "She had, by the side of her bed, a Louis Vuitton trunk that had been painted black by her father, and the Monogram was sort of peeking through."

The collection's limited release also coincides with the release of "The Stephen Sprouse Book" by Roger Padilha and Mauricio Padilha and a retrospective called "Rock on Mars" at Deitch Projects (18 Wooster Street Gallery in New York) from Jan. 8 to Feb. 28.

"He had this desire to take what he saw in the streets and elevate it," Jacobs said of Sprouse. "He was using all this stuff that was so costly, really beautiful materials, and he was doing it all so beautifully. There are so many people who try to affect a street style, but it doesn't have the integrity. Stephen's work was so stylistic, and it had street cred. You can't calculate that. You have it or you don't, and Stephen did."