The flat-topped trunk sits behind glass at the Asnières workshop, canvas still taut after a century and a half

The flat-topped trunk sits behind glass at the Asnières workshop, canvas still taut after a century and a half. Grey Trianon, not the monogram most recognise today. No brass nameplate, no destination stickers—just a rectangular form designed to stack cleanly in the hold of a steamship. One can read the entire house in that box: function preceding decoration, craft answering a specific need, and the quiet understanding that luxury begins with solving a problem well.

Louis Vuitton opened his atelier in 1854, three years after the Great Exhibition made travel a bourgeois aspiration rather than an aristocratic ordeal. The dome-topped trunks of the era—romantic, perhaps, but useless in a railway carriage—gave way to his stackable design. Poplar wood for lightness, canvas for weather resistance, and that flat lid which allowed porters to build stable towers in baggage cars. The innovation was structural, not stylistic. Vuitton was a layetier-emballeur, a packer, and his first clients came to him not for status but for competence.

The house monogram arrived in 1896, two years after the founder's death, when his son Georges sought to curb the copyists who'd flooded Paris with flat-topped imitators. The interlocking L and V, the quatrefoils and flowers—these were trademark devices, not ornament for its own sake. They worked. The canvas became unmistakable, and in becoming unmistakable, it became desirable. By the turn of the century, Louis Vuitton had moved from solving a problem to marking a position. The shift is worth noting. A house that begins in function and arrives at symbol has made a particular journey, one that carries certain permissions and certain debts.

The Petitjean years and the logic of expansion

For most of the twentieth century, Louis Vuitton remained a luggage house—admired, profitable, discreet. The catalogue expanded: the Keepall in 1930, the Noé in 1932 (originally a champagne carrier, five bottles upright), the Speedy in 1930 as well, shrunk to handbag scale in the Fifties at the request, so the story goes, of Audrey Hepburn. Each piece descended from that first trunk's logic. Make it well, make it light, make it last.

Henri Racamier, who married into the family and took the helm in 1977, understood that this logic had limits. He also understood that those limits could be moved. Under his direction, Louis Vuitton went public in 1984, then merged with Moët Hennessy in 1987, forming LVMH. The house became the engine of the world's largest luxury conglomerate, and the canvas became not merely recognisable but inescapable. Boutiques multiplied. Licensing deals proliferated, then were abruptly curtailed when Racamier realised that ubiquity and exclusivity cannot long coexist.

By the mid-Nineties, Louis Vuitton faced a problem its founder would have recognised: how to remain relevant when everyone already owns you. The solution, as it turned out, was not to make the product rarer but to make it stranger.

Jacobs and the artist's hand

Marc Jacobs arrived in 1997, the first designer to oversee ready-to-wear and accessories for a house built on trunks. His early collections were tentative—pretty, commercially safe, forgettable. Then, in 2001, he proposed a collaboration with Stephen Sprouse, the graffiti artist who'd dressed Debbie Harry and died in obscurity. Sprouse took the monogram canvas and scrawled neon obscenities across it. LVMH's board, one imagines, was not unanimously enthused.

The collection sold out in hours.

What Jacobs understood, and what the house has understood ever since, is that the monogram is not a logo but a canvas in the literal sense—a ground on which other artists can work. Takashi Murakami followed Sprouse in 2003, painting the canvas in cherry-blossom pink and electric white, adding googly-eyed characters that belonged in a Tokyo arcade, not a Place Vendôme vitrine. Richard Prince came in 2008 with jokes printed over the bags. Yayoi Kusama arrived in 2012 with her dots. Each collaboration was, in theory, a desecration. In practice, each reminded the customer that Louis Vuitton could afford to be playful because the underlying craft was never in question.

Jacobs left in 2013 after sixteen years, having turned the house into something his predecessor would scarcely recognise: a platform. Not merely a maker of objects but a space in which other makers could operate. Whether this represents an evolution or a dilution depends, as most things do, on one's tolerance for irony.

Ghesquière's brief tenure and what it clarified

Nicolas Ghesquière lasted three years, from 2013 to early planning stages that never bore his name on a collection. His appointment was announced, then quietly unwound. The reasons remain murky—creative differences, structural disagreements, the usual euphemisms. What matters is what his near-miss clarified: Louis Vuitton required a designer who could operate at Jacobs's scale without Jacobs's cynicism. Someone who took fashion seriously but didn't take Louis Vuitton too seriously. Someone who understood that a house this large is not an atelier but an ecosystem.

Virgil Abloh, who arrived in 2018 as men's artistic director, was that person—though not, perhaps, in the way the house anticipated.

Abloh and the question of access

Abloh's first show for Louis Vuitton took place in the Palais-Royal gardens, and the front row included Playboi Carti, Octavian, and Kid Cudi. No editors, or very few. The collection itself—workwear silhouettes in Wizard of Oz brights, bags with transparent PVC panels, a rainbow runway—was less interesting than the gesture. Abloh was saying, loudly, that Louis Vuitton belonged to his audience, not to the industry that had long claimed it.

The work that followed was uneven. Some pieces felt considered: the soft Keepall in monogram jacquard, the trunk-inspired jewellery cases, the collaborations with Nigo that nodded to both designers' shared vocabulary. Others felt rushed, merch-adjacent, more concerned with reach than with facture. Abloh's defenders argued that this was the point—that luxury had become gatekept to the point of irrelevance, and his mission was to dismantle the gate. His critics noted that dismantling a gate is easier when you've been invited through it, and that Louis Vuitton's margins remained robust regardless.

Abloh died in 2021, at forty-one, and the house has yet to name a successor for menswear. Pharrell Williams, who was announced in early 2023, brings a similar fluency in streetwear and a similar celebrity Rolodex. Whether he brings Abloh's urgency remains to be seen.

On the women's side, Nicolas Ghesquière finally did arrive—not in 2013 but in the role he was always suited for. Since 2013, his collections have been technically assured, intellectually referential, and commercially successful in the way that allows a house to take risks elsewhere. He is, in other words, the kind of designer a conglomerate treasures: consistent, prestigious, and disinclined to set things on fire.

What remains

Louis Vuitton now operates more than 460 stores, employs over 5,000 people in its ateliers, and generates north of twenty billion euros annually. The monogram appears on everything from keychains to kitchen trunks, often adjacent to a Supreme box logo or a Yayoi Kusama dot. The house has become a platform, a franchise, a Rorschach test onto which customers project aspiration, irony, nostalgia, or all three at once.

And yet the grey Trianon trunk still sits in Asnières, behind glass, doing nothing but existing. Poplar and canvas. Saddle-stitched seams. A flat top that allows for stacking. If you wanted to argue that Louis Vuitton has lost its way, you could start there—with the distance between that object and a neon-pink Takashi Murakami Speedy. If you wanted to argue the opposite, you'd start in the same place. The house has always answered the needs of its moment. In 1854, that meant building a better box. In 2024, it means being many things to many people, and doing so without apology.

Whether one finds that admirable or lamentable is, in the end, a matter of taste. The trunk, meanwhile, remains.