The fitting room on the third floor of 2 rue du Pont-Neuf is not large

The fitting room on the third floor of 2 rue du Pont-Neuf is not large. In 1997, when Marc Jacobs first walked into it — jet-lagged, uncertain, the first American to helm a French leather-goods house — he found bolts of toile stacked against one wall and a single dress form in the corner. No archive to speak of. No ready-to-wear heritage. Just trunks, and the weight of a name that had been making them since 1854.

He needed a face. Not a celebrity, not yet — this was before the monogram became a billboard for every starlet with a publicist. He needed a woman who could stand in front of a camera and make you believe that Louis Vuitton, a house built on the back of travel cases, belonged on a body.

The Pragmatist

Catherine Deneuve was fifty-four when she appeared in Jacobs's first campaign. She wore a wool coat, carried a Keepall, and looked like she had just stepped off a train. No styling tricks. No winking irony. The image, shot by Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, ran in French Vogue in 1998 and did something quietly radical: it suggested that Louis Vuitton was not aspirational so much as actual. A thing one used, not coveted.

Deneuve was not the house's first ambassador — that honour belongs to Audrey Hepburn, who carried a Speedy in the 1960s without ever signing a contract — but she was the first to formalise the relationship at a moment when the luxury industry was learning to monetise desire. Her presence anchored Jacobs's early collections, which were, by his own admission, tentative. He had been hired to invent a category. Deneuve gave him permission to start modestly.

The choice was shrewd. Deneuve's career had been built on a particular kind of Gallic restraint — Buñuel's Belle de Jour, Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg — and her face carried the memory of that discipline. She did not need Louis Vuitton. The reverse, arguably, was true. When she appeared in subsequent campaigns through the early 2000s, often alone, often in black and white, the subtext was clear: this is a house for women who have already arrived.

The Insurgent

By 2007, the strategy had shifted. Jacobs was no longer tentative. He had turned Louis Vuitton into the most profitable brand within LVMH, and he had done it, in part, by courting disruption. Enter Sofia Coppola.

Coppola was thirty-six, newly married, and had just released Marie Antoinette, a film that treated Versailles like a teenager's bedroom. Jacobs gave her a bag. Not a Speedy or a Neverfull, but a new style: a soft, unstructured hobo in calfskin, named the SC (her initials) and later rebranded as the Softy. It was the opposite of Louis Vuitton's archival rigour — no structure, no hardware, no monogram unless you asked for it. It sold briskly.

The collaboration was less about the bag than about what Coppola represented. She was the daughter of a director, yes, but she had also made Lost in Translation on a modest budget and won an Oscar for the screenplay. She moved between high and low culture without visible effort. She wore Chanel to the Met Gala and Converse to her own premieres. Jacobs understood that this fluidity — this refusal to perform luxury in the expected register — was where the market was headed.

Coppola appeared in campaigns through 2014, often photographed in Los Angeles or Tokyo, cities that felt distant from the maison's Parisian roots. The images, shot by Juergen Teller and later by Steven Meisel, were intimate, almost casual. In one, she sits in a hotel room in a slip dress, the SC bag on the floor beside her. The message: Louis Vuitton is not a museum piece. It is a thing you live with.

The risk, of course, was that the house might lose its sense of occasion. Jacobs managed to avoid that, largely by pairing Coppola's insouciance with other, more theatrical campaigns — Scarlett Johansson in a ballgown, Madonna in a diner. The mix worked. By the time Jacobs left in 2013, Louis Vuitton was generating over €7 billion in annual revenue, much of it from bags that women under forty wanted to carry.

The Inheritor

When Nicolas Ghesquière took over in 2013, he inherited a house that had been defined, for sixteen years, by one man's vision. He also inherited a roster of ambassadors that included Jennifer Connelly, Michelle Williams, and Alicia Vikander — accomplished actresses, all, but none of whom felt particularly his. He needed someone who could articulate the shift.

Léa Seydoux was twenty-nine when she became the face of Louis Vuitton in 2016. She had just starred in Blue Is the Warmest Colour, a film that won the Palme d'Or and featured a seven-minute sex scene that was dissected in every major publication. She was French, she was serious, and she had the kind of face — wide-set eyes, strong jaw — that photographed well in both colour and black and white. Ghesquière cast her in his first major campaign, shot by Bruce Weber in the Nevada desert.

The images were stark. Seydoux wore a leather jacket and jeans, carried a Petite Malle (a trunk-shaped bag that Ghesquière had introduced as a signature), and stared directly into the camera. No smile. No softness. The campaign ran in spring 2016, and the response was immediate: this was not Jacobs's Louis Vuitton. This was something cooler, more architectural, less concerned with charm.

Seydoux has remained with the house for eight years, appearing in campaigns for the Capucines, the Twist, and most recently, the Pont 9. She has also starred in two James Bond films, a fact that Louis Vuitton has leveraged carefully — not by dressing her in evening gowns, but by emphasising her range. In a 2022 campaign, she wore a shearling coat and boots, standing in front of a brutalist building in Paris's 13th arrondissement. The location was deliberate. Ghesquière has spent a decade trying to reposition Louis Vuitton as a house that understands cities, not just airports.

Whether that repositioning will hold is an open question. Ghesquière's tenure has been commercially successful — the house continues to grow — but it has also been marked by a certain restlessness. He shows in unconventional spaces (the TWA terminal at JFK, the Louvre's glass pyramid), he collaborates with artists (Fornasetti, Kusama), and he cycles through references at a pace that can feel, at times, exhausting. Seydoux, to her credit, has remained a constant. She does not try to explain the clothes. She simply wears them, and in doing so, she offers a kind of continuity that the work itself sometimes lacks.

One might argue that this is the role of the muse in the twenty-first century: not to embody a vision, but to anchor it. To stand still while everything around her shifts. Whether that is enough — whether any one woman can carry the weight of a house that now generates over €20 billion annually — is a question Louis Vuitton will spend the next decade answering.