## L'homme et la malle

L'homme et la malle

Louis Vuitton arrived in Paris on foot in 1837, sixteen years old, having walked the three hundred and fifty kilometres from Anchay, a hamlet in the Jura. The journey took him two years. He worked odd jobs along the way — wheelwright's assistant, carpenter's apprentice — and when he finally reached the capital, he apprenticed himself to Monsieur Maréchal, a trunk-maker whose atelier sat near the Place Vendôme. Maréchal specialised in layetier work: packing cases for the wardrobes of aristocrats who travelled by coach and steamer. Vuitton learned to cut poplar and beech, to line interiors with canvas, to fit brass corners that would hold under the weight of stacked luggage in a ship's hold.

By 1854, he had opened his own workshop at 4 Rue Neuve-des-Capucines. The timing was consequential. Napoleon III had just commissioned Baron Haussmann to remake Paris, and the new boulevards were filling with a merchant class that travelled not for exile or diplomacy but for leisure. They wanted luggage that could withstand rail and sea, that stacked neatly, that didn't announce its contents to every porter between Gare Saint-Lazare and the Riviera. Vuitton's first significant departure from tradition was structural: he made his trunks flat-topped rather than domed. The dome, a holdover from the days when rain was the chief enemy, made stacking impossible. A flat lid, reinforced with iron bands and covered in grey Trianon canvas, allowed ten trunks to travel where three had gone before.

The canvas itself — waterproofed, tightly woven, less prone to cracking than leather — became a signature before it became a pattern. In 1876, Vuitton switched to a beige-and-red striped canvas to deter counterfeiters, who had begun to flood the market with copies. It didn't work. By the 1880s, the maison was fighting imitators across Europe. Georges Vuitton, Louis's son, took over in 1892 and introduced the Monogram canvas two years later: interlocking LV initials, quatrefoils, and stylised flowers on a brown ground. The design borrowed from japonisme, which was then in vogue, but its function was legal as much as aesthetic. A registered pattern could be defended in court. A style could not.

Ce qui reste, ce qui change

Walk into the flagship on the Champs-Élysées today and you will find, on the second floor, a small vitrine containing one of the original flat-topped trunks. The canvas is faded, the brass tarnished, the interior lined with striped cotton that has gone soft at the corners. It sits behind glass like a relic, which in a sense it is. The house still makes trunks — bespoke commissions, mostly, for clients who want a case for a tea service or a guitar or a collection of vintage watches — but the atelier that produces them is no longer on Rue Neuve-des-Capucines. It moved to Asnières in 1859, and it remains there, a low-slung building on the western edge of Paris where a team of thirty artisans works to order. The process has changed less than one might expect. Poplar and beech have given way to okoume, a lighter wood from Central Africa. Brass corners are still fitted by hand, though the locks are now machined in Switzerland. The canvas, of course, is still Monogram, printed in Ducey and sent north by truck.

The rest of the house — the part that shows on runways twice a year, that fills the windows along Avenue Montaigne, that generates the revenue to keep the atelier in Asnières open — is a different enterprise. Louis Vuitton, the brand, is now the largest maison within LVMH, Bernard Arnault's conglomerate. It produces ready-to-wear, shoes, jewellery, fragrances, and, above all, leather goods: handbags that account for more than half the house's income. The Speedy, the Neverfull, the Capucines — these are not trunks, though they descend from them in the way a sedan descends from a coach. They are designed in Paris, prototyped in Asnières, and manufactured in a network of ateliers across France and Spain. The leather is Italian or French, depending on the line. The hardware is still brass, though now it's plated in gold or palladium. The construction remains, by industry standards, meticulous: saddle-stitched seams, edge-painted rather than bound, with a guarantee that runs for two years and, in practice, much longer.

Les créateurs, au pluriel

Louis Vuitton himself never designed a handbag. The first one to bear the house name — the Steamer Bag, a smaller, softer cousin to the trunk — appeared in 1901, nine years after his death. His son Georges oversaw its development. His grandson Gaston-Louis introduced the Keepall in 1930, a duffel made from Monogram canvas that folded flat when empty. These were not fashion objects in the contemporary sense. They were functional pieces that happened to be well made and, because of the Monogram, recognisable.

The shift toward fashion, capital-F, began in 1997, when LVMH hired Marc Jacobs as artistic director. Jacobs was thirty-four, American, and known for his work at Perry Ellis, where he had been fired after showing a grunge collection that the company deemed uncommercial. At Louis Vuitton, he had a different mandate: make the house relevant to a generation that didn't travel by steamer trunk. His first collection, for Spring 1998, was shown on a runway for the first time in the house's history. It included ready-to-wear, shoes, and bags — among them a Monogram canvas tote lined in brightly coloured leather. The tote was, in retrospect, a quiet revolution. It took the house's most conservative asset, the Monogram, and made it young.

Jacobs stayed for sixteen years. He brought in collaborators — Stephen Sprouse, who graffitied the Monogram in 2001; Takashi Murakami, who added cartoon cherries and multicoloured logos in 2003; Richard Prince, who printed jokes over the canvas in 2008 — and each collaboration generated both controversy and sales. The house, which had once been the domain of a certain kind of traveller, became the domain of a certain kind of collector. Vuitton bags appeared on fashion blogs, in hip-hop videos, in the arms of women who had never boarded a transatlantic steamer and never would.

Jacobs left in 2013. Nicolas Ghesquière, formerly of Balenciaga, took over womenswear. Virgil Abloh, founder of Off-White and a trained architect, was named artistic director of menswear in 2018 — the first Black designer to hold that position at a French luxury house. Abloh's work, until his death in 2021, leaned heavily on collaboration and cultural reference: a Keepall in transparent PVC, a trunk covered in neon Monogram, a collection inspired by The Wizard of Oz. Pharrell Williams succeeded him in 2023, bringing a similar appetite for spectacle and a deeper Rolodex.

La facture, ou l'idée de la facture

One question remains, and it is not easily answered: what, if anything, of Louis Vuitton's original métier survives in the house that bears his name? The Monogram endures, though it has been reinterpreted so many times — embossed, perforated, printed on denim, silk, and rubber — that it functions now as a logo rather than a pattern. The ateliers endure, though they produce handbags at a scale that would have been unimaginable in 1854. The commitment to craft endures, at least in theory, though one suspects that the saddle stitch on a Capucines bag, made by a craftsperson who will complete twelve such bags in a day, is a different animal from the saddle stitch on a trunk, made by a craftsperson who will complete one trunk in a month.

What has changed, and changed irrevocably, is the house's relationship to its client. Louis Vuitton made trunks for people who needed them. The house now makes bags for people who want them, and the want is cultivated, maintained, and renewed every six months on a runway. This is not a criticism. It is simply the condition of a luxury house in the twenty-first century. The craft remains, but it is no longer the point. The point is the desire the craft enables.

In Asnières, the atelier still takes commissions. A client can order a trunk for a specific purpose — a case for a collection of rare books, say, or a humidor lined in Spanish cedar — and the atelier will build it, by hand, over the course of several weeks. The price will run to five figures, sometimes six. The client will wait. And when the trunk arrives, it will be a Louis Vuitton in the original sense: a functional object, made with care, that happens to be beautiful. Whether that is enough to justify the house's existence, or merely a footnote to it, is a question each client must answer for themselves.