The lock on a 1906 steamer trunk, opened this past autumn in the basement of 2 rue du Pont-Neuf, still turned

The lock on a 1906 steamer trunk, opened this past autumn in the basement of 2 rue du Pont-Neuf, still turned. Brass mechanism, hand-filed tumblers, no rust. The canvas — Monogram, naturally — had aged to the colour of burnt caramel, and someone in 1924 had inked 'Deauville' in fountain pen along the interior lid. But the lock worked. One suspects that tells you more about Louis Vuitton than a century of advertising ever could.

What began in 1854 as a workshop making flat-topped trunks for the railway age became, over sixteen decades, the world's most profitable luxury house. Not the most revered, necessarily. Not the most discreet. But the one that moved the most volume, year after year, while maintaining margins that would make a Swiss banker blush. How that happened — and what it cost — is a story in three acts.

Acte I : Le malletier, 1854–1936

Louis Vuitton Malletier arrived in Paris on foot in 1837, aged sixteen, from the Jura. He apprenticed with Romain Maréchal, a trunk-maker to the imperial household, and learned the craft that would bear his name. In 1854 he opened his own atelier on rue Neuve-des-Capucines. The innovation, such as it was, lay in the shape: flat lids instead of the domed trunks then in vogue. Flat trunks stacked. They didn't roll in a luggage car. Practical, not poetic.

The Trianon grey canvas came first, in 1854. The red-striped Rayée followed in the 1870s, a deterrent to counterfeiters who were already copying the flat-top design. Then, in 1896, Georges Vuitton — Louis's son — commissioned a pattern from the painter Georges de Feure. The result was the Monogram: interlocking LV initials, quatrefoils, and stylised flowers on a field of tan. Art Nouveau by way of Japan, rendered in coated canvas. It has not changed since.

One could argue that the Monogram was defensive — another anti-counterfeit measure — but it became something else entirely. A house signature that worked at five metres and five centimetres. Recognisable to a maharaja in Bombay and a shopgirl in Lyon. The democratisation of luxury, if you want to call it that, started with a pattern you could read from across a train platform.

By 1936, when Gaston-Louis Vuitton introduced the Speedy — a smaller, softer version of the Keepall — the maison had codified a vocabulary. Monogram canvas, vachetta leather trim, brass hardware, hand-stitched seams. The materials were good, not exceptional. The construction was sound, not obsessive. What Louis Vuitton sold, even then, was not scarcity but availability. A trunk for anyone who could afford a trunk.

Acte II : L'empire, 1987–1997

The modern Louis Vuitton begins not in 1854 but in 1987, when Bernard Arnault took control of the house and folded it into what would become LVMH. Arnault understood something the family had not: that a luxury brand could scale without breaking, provided you controlled every variable. Manufacturing, distribution, retail, advertising. No franchises, no licences, no department-store counters. Vertical integration as a form of creative control.

He hired Yves Carcelle to run the maison and gave him two mandates: open stores and make bags. Carcelle opened 130 stores in a decade. As for bags, he turned to Marc Jacobs.

Jacobs arrived in 1997, the first ready-to-wear artistic director in the house's history. Louis Vuitton had never made clothing. It made luggage. But Arnault wanted runway shows, editorial coverage, a seat at the Paris calendar. Jacobs gave him that, and more. The Spring 1998 show — his first — featured models in slip dresses and Monogram bags carried like evening clutches. It was, by the standards of the house, almost perverse. Luggage as fashion. Canvas as status.

The collaboration collections followed: Stephen Sprouse in 2001 (graffiti over Monogram), Takashi Murakami in 2003 (multicolour, cherry blossoms, panda eyes). Purists recoiled. Accountants smiled. The Murakami Multicolore line alone generated an estimated half-billion euros in its first three years. One could call it crass. One could also call it effective.

Jacobs stayed sixteen years. In that time, Louis Vuitton became the first luxury house to break ten billion euros in annual revenue. The shows grew larger, the collaborations more frequent, the handbag launches relentless. By 2013, when Jacobs staged his final show — a full-scale carousel inside the Cour Carrée du Louvre — the question was no longer whether Louis Vuitton could scale. It was whether it could do anything else.

Acte III : La réinitialisation, 2018–présent

Nicolas Ghesquière lasted five years. Kim Jones, who took over menswear in 2011, brought streetwear credibility and a Supreme collaboration that broke the internet, if not new ground. But the decisive shift came in 2018, when Virgil Abloh became artistic director of men's collections.

Abloh was not a trained couturier. He was a DJ, an architect by degree, a designer by inclination, and the founder of Off-White. What he understood, better than most in the trade, was how luxury signalled in the age of Instagram. His first show, Spring 2019, featured a rainbow runway and models in logo-heavy looks that read as both homage and pastiche. The clothes themselves were fine. The conversation they generated was worth more.

Abloh died in November 2021, aged forty-one. The house has not named a successor. Pharrell Williams took over menswear in 2023, bringing a different kind of celebrity — musician, producer, collector — but a similar logic. Louis Vuitton no longer sells to the customer who wants quiet luxury. It sells to the customer who wants loud luxury, worn quietly. A Keepall in Monogram Eclipse. A Tambour watch with a skeletonised movement. A leather jacket that costs what a car used to.

On the women's side, Ghesquière remains. His collections are cerebral, technically accomplished, and largely ignored by the handbag customer who accounts for sixty-odd percent of revenue. The bags themselves — Capucines, Coussin, Petite Malle — are designed in-house, often with input from the leather goods studio rather than the runway team. This is not a criticism. It is a recognition that Louis Vuitton operates, in effect, as two houses under one name. One makes fashion. The other makes money.

Où en sommes-nous

Walk into the Champs-Élysées flagship on a Saturday afternoon and you'll find queues. Not for a limited edition, not for a collaboration. Just to enter the store. Security at the door, crowd control on the ground floor, a thirty-minute wait to see a sales associate. This is not scarcity. This is volume management.

The house produces, by some estimates, north of four million bags a year. It operates over 460 stores. It advertises everywhere, collaborates with everyone, and makes a point of being both exclusive and accessible — a trick very few houses have managed. Whether that represents the apex of luxury or its inversion is, in the end, a matter of perspective.

But return to that 1906 trunk, the one with the working lock. Someone made it by hand, fitted the brass, stretched the canvas, and signed the interior in pencil. It travelled to Deauville, survived two wars, and ended up in a basement where it sat, unopened, for seventy years. When they finally turned the key, it opened on the first try.

One imagines Louis Vuitton would have found that satisfactory. Whether he would recognise the house that bears his name is another question entirely.