Louis Vuitton: a house, in brief

The flat-topped trunk sits in a climate-controlled vitrine on the second floor of the Asnières workshop, twenty minutes north-west of Paris. Grey Trianon canvas, brass corners, a lock mechanism that still turns. Built in 1858, the year Louis Vuitton opened his first atelier. The detail that matters: it stacks. Before Vuitton, travel trunks had domed lids to shed rain. They also rolled off carriages and couldn't be piled. Vuitton made his flat. Waterproofed the canvas. Sold them to a clientele that moved often and valued both order and discretion. The innovation wasn't aesthetic. It was structural.

That trunk contains, in miniature, the house's governing logic for the next century and a half: solve a problem of use, then refine the solution until it becomes a language.

Founding principle: the workshop as laboratory

Louis Vuitton was a layetier-emballeur — a packer — before he was a maker. He wrapped the belongings of Empress Eugénie, which meant understanding weight distribution, material behaviour, the physics of a transatlantic crossing. When he opened his own workshop in 1854, he wasn't starting a fashion house. He was solving the mechanical problems of displacement.

The Trianon canvas gave way to the striped red-and-beige Rayée in 1876, then the beige-and-brown Damier in 1888, each iteration a response to counterfeiters. The monogram canvas — LV, quatrefoils, flowers — arrived in 1896, two years after Louis's death, designed by his son Georges. It was, and remains, a lock disguised as a pattern. You can't copy what's trademarked. The house had, by the turn of the century, established its method: engineer first, ornament second, and make sure the ornament does work.

This wasn't couture. It was industrial design with a human scale. The atelier system — one craftsperson overseeing a trunk from cutting to finishing — kept production tight. Clients ordered by name. A Vuitton trunk in 1900 wasn't aspirational. It was bespoke infrastructure for people who moved between properties and needed their things to arrive intact.

Marc Jacobs and the handbag as protagonist

For most of the twentieth century, Louis Vuitton made luggage. Handbags were an accessory to the luggage line, practical derivatives of the Keepall or the Steamer. That changed in 1997 when LVMH installed Marc Jacobs as artistic director — the first time the house had hired a ready-to-wear designer, and an American one at that.

Jacobs didn't arrive with a thesis. He arrived with a suspicion that the monogram canvas, then associated primarily with airport duty-free, could be re-contextualised. His first collection for Spring/Summer 1998 was tentative: streamlined coats, slip dresses, a few bags that nodded to the archive without reproducing it. The press was polite. The house was patient.

The shift came in 2000, when Stephen Sprouse — a New York artist who'd dressed Debbie Harry and designed for Halston — graffitied the monogram canvas in day-glo. The Graffiti collection landed somewhere between vandalism and homage. It sold out. More to the point, it suggested that the canvas could be a surface, not a fixed identity. Takashi Murakami followed in 2003 with the Multicolore monogram, then the Cherry Blossom, then the Panda. The collaborations were playful, occasionally garish, and they repositioned Louis Vuitton as a house willing to treat its own codes as raw material.

Jacobs's tenure — sixteen years, 1997 to 2013 — turned the handbag into Louis Vuitton's centre of gravity. The Speedy, the Alma, the Neverfull: styles that had existed in relative quiet became global signifiers. He also introduced ready-to-wear that didn't apologise for existing alongside luggage. The runway shows grew more theatrical. The collaborations multiplied: Richard Prince, Yayoi Kusama, Frank Gehry. By the time Jacobs left, Louis Vuitton was no longer a trunk-maker that also made clothes. It was a fashion house with a founding story in luggage.

Abloh and the question of access

Virgil Abloh's appointment in 2018 as men's artistic director was a different kind of wager. Jacobs had been an established designer when he arrived. Abloh was a DJ, architect, creative director of Kanye West's projects, and founder of Off-White — a Milan-based streetwear label that trafficked in irony and quotation marks. He had no formal training in fashion. He also had a constituency: a generation that understood luxury as a language to be remixed, not received.

His first show, Spring/Summer 2019, opened with a question projected onto the runway: "Where are the Black designers?" Abloh populated the front row with his friends and collaborators, many of them young, Black, and from outside the traditional fashion system. The clothes — workwear silhouettes in Vuitton's monogram, bags with transparent PVC panels, a colour gradient that ran from white to every shade in the Pantone spectrum — were less about technical innovation than about who was being addressed. The house had, for the first time in its history, made a collection that felt like an open door.

Abloh's three years at Louis Vuitton — he died in November 2021 — were divisive. Some in the trade found the work undercooked, the references too literal. Others argued that he'd done what Jacobs had done two decades earlier: he'd changed the house's audience. The collaborations continued: Nike, Nigo, a trunk for the FIFA World Cup trophy. The gesture was consistent. Abloh treated Louis Vuitton not as a temple but as a platform, one that could accommodate streetwear, fine art, sport, music, and still cohere.

Whether that coherence held is still debated. What isn't debatable: he expanded the maison's address. A seventeen-year-old in Seoul buying an LV trainer in 2020 wasn't thinking about Empress Eugénie. He was thinking about Virgil.

What remains

Pharrell Williams now holds Abloh's position. Nicolas Ghesquière has designed women's collections since 2013, working in a more restrained register: sharp tailoring, archival references, a sustained interest in the 1960s and '70s. The house, on balance, is in a period of negotiation. It has Ghesquière's intellectual precision and Pharrell's pop fluency, and the two don't always speak the same language. That may be the point.

Louis Vuitton is still, at its core, a workshop. The atelier in Asnières employs three hundred craftspeople. A custom trunk takes four months. The savoir-faire hasn't gone anywhere. What's changed is the house's sense of who it's speaking to, and in what tone. The monogram canvas, once a deterrent to counterfeiters, is now a meme, a collaboration surface, a point of entry for audiences who may never commission a trunk but will buy a wallet, a belt, a small leather good that carries the code.

Walk through the Asnières workshop and you'll see both: a craftsman hand-stitching a trunk lining in the same manner as his predecessor in 1920, and a few rooms over, a prototype for a capsule collection with a musician whose name won't be announced for another six months. The house has learned to hold both at once. Whether that's compromise or evolution depends, as ever, on taste.

That first trunk, the flat-topped one from 1858, is still there in the vitrine. It doesn't look revolutionary. It looks like a box. But it stacks.