The workshop stood at 4, rue Neuve-des-Capucines, a short walk from the Place Vendôme

The workshop stood at 4, rue Neuve-des-Capucines, a short walk from the Place Vendôme. The year was 1854. Louis Vuitton, then thirty-three, had spent the previous seventeen years layering canvas, oiling hinges, and solving the geometry of stacking trunks in the holds of steamships. He had apprenticed under Monsieur Maréchal, the most sought-after layetier-emballeur in Paris — a packer and trunk-maker to the aristocracy. Now he was opening his own atelier, under his own name, with a single proposition: flat-topped trunks covered in grey Trianon canvas, engineered to stack without toppling.

It was not a romantic beginning. It was a mechanical one.

The problem of the dome

Before Vuitton, trunks wore rounded lids. The logic was simple: water ran off. But rounded lids do not stack, and by the 1850s, the world was moving faster. Trains had schedules. Steamships had manifests. Luggage needed to fit into compartments, not sprawl across carriage floors. Vuitton's flat trunk was a response to infrastructure, not aesthetics. He used poplar for lightness, reinforced the corners with brass, and lined the interiors in striped cotton. The canvas was waterproofed with a coating he did not patent but also did not share.

Within a decade, Louis Vuitton had outgrown rue Neuve-des-Capucines and moved production to Asnières, a suburb along the Seine. The workshop is still there. You can visit it, though you must book months ahead. They will show you the same poplar-framed construction, the same hand-applied corner caps. What they will not show you — because it no longer exists in the same form — is the original grey canvas. Vuitton switched to beige-and-brown stripes in 1876, after counterfeiters flooded the market with grey imitations. The pattern, called rayé, lasted three years before he replaced it again.

A pattern as passport

In 1888, Georges Vuitton — Louis's son, by then running the house after his father's death — introduced the Damier check. Beige and brown squares, with a repeating text woven in: marque L. Vuitton déposée. Registered trademark. It was one of the first examples of a logo functioning as both ornament and legal defence. The Damier worked. Sales doubled. But Georges was already sketching something else.

The monogram canvas appeared in 1896. Interlocking L and V, surrounded by quatrefoils and flowers, printed on coated linen in chocolate and tan. The design borrowed from Japanese mon crests, which had saturated Parisian taste after the 1867 Exposition Universelle. Georges called it an homage. Others called it shrewd. Either way, it became indelible. You see it now on a canvas tote crossing Boulevard Saint-Germain, and you do not need to look twice.

One suspects Georges understood that a pattern, unlike a product, could travel without dilution. A trunk is a trunk. A monogram is a language.

What the house was not

Louis Vuitton did not make handbags. Not in his lifetime, and not for decades after. The house made luggage: trunks for transatlantic crossings, smaller cases for hats and shoes, malle-cabine wardrobes that unfolded into portable closets. The first proper handbag — the Steamer Bag, a soft-sided carryall designed to fit inside a trunk — appeared in 1901, five years after the monogram. Even then, it was an accessory to travel, not to daily life.

The Speedy arrived in 1930, miniaturised from a larger travel bag at the request of Coco Chanel, or so the story goes. The Keepall came shortly after, a weekender in monogram canvas with leather handles. Both were practical, neither was precious. The house did not position itself in the realm of jewellery or couture. It positioned itself in the realm of movement.

This is worth remembering when you see a monogram Neverfull used as a grocery tote or a gym bag. The house was never precious about function. It was precious about construction.

Expansion, acquisition, and the arrival of Arnault

By the 1970s, Louis Vuitton was still family-run, still focused on luggage, still manufacturing in Asnières. Then came the merger. In 1987, Louis Vuitton joined with Moët Hennessy to form LVMH, the luxury conglomerate now valued north of €400 billion. Bernard Arnault took control two years later. He installed new leadership, expanded the product range, and opened the house to ready-to-wear.

Marc Jacobs arrived in 1997 as artistic director, the first time Louis Vuitton had hired a designer for clothing. He brought Stephen Sprouse's graffiti to the monogram, commissioned Takashi Murakami's multicolour reinterpretation, and turned the runway into a cultural forum. Whether this was an evolution or a departure depends on whom you ask. The house sold more bags than ever. It also became something Louis Vuitton, the man, might not recognise.

Jacobs left in 2013. Nicolas Ghesquière took over womenswear, Virgil Abloh menswear in 2018. Abloh died in 2021; Pharrell Williams succeeded him in 2023. The pace of change has accelerated. Collaborations arrive seasonally: Yayoi Kusama, Tyler, the Creator, a capsule with the NBA. The monogram has been reimagined in denim, in patent leather, in perforated metal. One can argue this is innovation. One can also argue it is noise.

What remains

Return to Asnières. The atelier still operates, still produces bespoke trunks on commission. You can order a case for a violin, for a bicycle, for a collection of vintage fountain pens. The process is the same: poplar frame, hand-applied canvas, brass fittings polished to a low gleam. The craftspeople — there are fewer than two hundred — train for years before they touch a commission. They use the same tools Louis Vuitton used in 1854, though the workshop now has climate control and better lighting.

This is the part of the house that has not changed, because it cannot scale. You cannot make a bespoke trunk faster by hiring more hands. You can only make more trunks by training more hands, and training takes time. It is the opposite of the fashion calendar, which runs on six-month cycles and expects newness as a constant.

The question, then, is whether Louis Vuitton is a trunk-maker that expanded into fashion, or a fashion house that once made trunks. The answer is probably both, and also neither. It is a brand large enough to contain contradictions. You can buy a monogram Pochette for under €1,000, or commission a custom trunk for €80,000. You can queue for a Pharrell collaboration, or wait two years for a piece of Asnières savoir-faire. The house allows for both.

What Louis Vuitton, the man, built was a solution to a problem: how to move one's belongings across distances without damage. What his descendants built was a symbol, infinitely reproducible, attached to objects that may or may not move anywhere at all. Whether that represents continuity or rupture is, in the end, a matter of how you define a house. By its origins, or by what it has become.