Louis Vuitton Unveils Experiential Flagships in Seoul and Beijing

PARIS – Louis Vuitton is betting on retailtainment to jumpstart luxury spending in Asia.

The French luxury brand on Friday opened a new store in Seoul featuring a combination of brand history, exclusive collections and fine dining, designed to lure back younger shoppers who have turned their backs on luxury products in favor of experiences.

The six-story LV The Place Seoul inside The Reserve, part of department store group Shinsegae’s renovated luxury complex in the popular shopping district of Myeongdong, is Vuitton’s latest hybrid retail project in Asia following LV The Place in Bangkok, which opened last year, and The Louis in Shanghai, which bowed in June.

The Seoul location stretches over 53,720 square feet, including 33,600 square feet of retail, a record 12,175 square feet of exhibition space and a rooftop restaurant helmed by Michelin-starred chef Junghyun Park.

Pietro Beccari, chairman and chief executive officer of Louis Vuitton, said the location would function as a test site for future mega-flagships designed to reflect its status as a cultural brand.

“It’s going to be very much an experiment,” he told WWD. “Not every store will be able to have this type of storytelling, of course, but if it’s working – and we’ll see together if it’s working – why not have one in every major zone, in every major continent?”

In tandem with the opening in Seoul, Vuitton is gearing up for the Dec. 19 inauguration of its Maison Louis Vuitton store in Beijing’s Taikoo Li Sanlitun, a high-end shopping destination developed by Swire Properties.

Designed by renowned architect Jun Aoki, the building will feature the city’s first Louis Vuitton Café, making it the third mainland China location to offer a Vuitton-branded dining experience after The Hall in Chengdu and The Louis in Shanghai.

The openings come after parent company LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton reported a slight improvement in the third quarter, with organic sales rising 2 percent in Asia-Pacific, excluding Japan.

While spending by Chinese tourists abroad was still down in the double digits, the performance in mainland China turned positive in the third quarter, with growth in the mid- to high-single digits.

The Louis was one of the drivers. Shaped like a life-size cruise ship, it features a store, café and exhibition space, and is now one of the brand’s top locations for selling luggage.

Leading by Example

As the world’s largest luxury brand, Vuitton has a responsibility to innovate, argued Beccari. He noted that LVMH chairman and CEO Bernard Arnault and Yves Carcelle, the late former CEO of Vuitton, kickstarted the era of the mega-store with the opening of its flagship on Avenue des Champs-Elysées in 2005.

“Probably we lacked some innovation into the retail area for some time,” Beccari mused of the more recent period.

“At the end of the day, the market is still huge, still big. There are companies doing better than others, and we are pretty satisfied about the way we keep our market share, and somehow we increase our market share, and we want to go further. And I think the way to go further is through innovation and through new concepts,” he said.

“In Seoul, it’s something really completely new, because it’s taking the concept of The Place in Bangkok and the Shanghai boat to the next level,” he added.

Beccari is giving himself five to six years to implement the concept on a larger scale, with prospective locations including a super-mega flagship under construction on the Champs-Elysées, due to open in 2027 or 2028, and another planned in Beverly Hills in a site previously earmarked for a Cheval Blanc luxury hotel.

During his prior tenure at Dior, Beccari’s mantra seemed to be “Go big or go home” as he rolled out impactful pop-up shops and department store takeovers, large-scale exhibitions and a Paris flagship that set a new standard by incorporating a museum, a restaurant, haute couture salons and a hotel suite.

His ambitions at Vuitton have been tempered by the protracted slump in luxury spending that has seen 50 million aspirational customers drop out of the market, according to Bain & Company and Altagamma. Immersive experiences are seen as key to winning them back, amid ongoing resistance to skyrocketing prices.

The latest Bain-Altagamma Luxury Goods Worldwide Market Study reported a “tectonic shift” toward luxury experiences such as hospitality cruises and fine dining, reshaping the industry.

“Expansion will favor fewer, higher-impact locations — a shift toward a more discerning, experience-led model,” said Bain senior partner Claudia D’Arpizio, who heads the firm’s global fashion and luxury practice.

Further Education

Beccari said exhibitions focused on brand codes such as the monogram, which will celebrate its 130th anniversary next year, are necessary to underline the timelessness of Vuitton’s products.

“The new generation, they like to know why certain prices are considerably high, and why a product carries a certain value,” he said. “There is a value of the savoir-faire, of the material, but there’s also the value of the history and why the product is precious, and why you can pass it to the next generation and it doesn’t lose value.”

He gave a taste of what retailtainment might look like in the U.S. with the opening last year of a temporary store on 57th Street in New York City that features five-story stacks of trunks in the atrium and more recently – for three weeks only – an exhibition of two masterpieces by Impressionist painter Gustave Caillebotte.

At LV The Place Seoul, visitors can enter through a tunnel lined with hat boxes and take a lift or escalators to the “Louis Vuitton Visionary Journeys Seoul” exhibition, which starts on the fifth floor and finishes on the fourth, leading to a Café Louis Vuitton offering sweet treats by award-winning pastry chef Maxime Frédéric.

Designed with Shohei Shigematsu, a New York-based partner of architectural firm OMA, the exhibit unfolds in six chapters telling the story of the brand’s roots in 19th century travel and its workshops in Asnières on the outskirts of Paris.

One themed room is dedicated to personalization and is flanked by a space offering Vuitton’s Mon Monogram service, which allows customers to add initials, colored stripes and patches to their bags. Another focuses on watches, and is also designed to stoke interest in the offering in store.

Among the exhibits is an Artycapucines bag designed by artist Park Seo-Bo, and the opening look from Nicolas Ghesquière’s pre-fall 2023 women’s collection, which was memorably presented on Seoul’s Jamsugyo Bridge.

The color palette of the store harks back to the multicolored stripe pattern of the traditional Korean fabric known as saekdong, and an atrium staircase is decorated with columns of trunks made of traditional hanji paper lanterns decorated with monograms.

The boutique carries an exclusive capsule collection with versions of the Capucines BB, Speedy Soft and All in BB handbag styles, as well as the Attrape-Rêves and Imagination scents. In the gift store, collectibles include a Vivienne figurine dressed up for Seoul.

The JP at Louis Vuitton restaurant on the sixth floor marks Korean-born chef Junghyun Park’s first venue in the country. He is best known for his Atomix restaurant in New York City, which has two Michelin stars and ranked number one in the inaugural North America’s 50 Best Restaurants 2025 list.

Courting China’s Gen Z

Vuitton, which opened its first store in Seoul in 1984, now has 23 locations in the country. With the Maison Louis Vuitton Sanlitun store, it will have 56 in China, where its focus has shifted from adding new boutiques to renovating or relocating existing ones.

“We are pretty optimistic mid-term in China, but that doesn’t mean that we have to open a big number of stores,” Beccari said. “We are applying the same moderate approach everywhere in the world so normally, our big capex are dedicated to taking the current stores and make them more beautiful, more welcoming, rather than opening new stores.”

The Sanlitun boutique is designed to cater to a younger clientele than its Shin Kong Place store. The area is seeing an influx of luxury brands alongside more accessible offerings like sportswear.

“In this part of the city, we see a lot of Gen Z going to do their shopping,” the executive noted. “To create a second big pole in Beijing, I think, is strategically important.”

The store will carry entry-level products such as eyewear, scarves and bag charms alongside more casual ready-to-wear, but will also cater to high-end shoppers, with four private lounges dedicated to VIC clients.

“We apply geomarketing. When we have different stores in the city, we try to cover different segments according to the type of client, according to the localization inside the city,” said Beccari, adding that 20 percent of the store’s offering will be customized.

The facade designed by Aoki, made of hand-curved pieces of glass, is inspired by the organic shapes of taihu stones, often used as signature pieces in Chinese gardens, and by a 2016 dress designed by Ghesquière. Works by local artists are dotted throughout the space, which includes a VIP dining room with capacity for eight guests.

While the focus may be on bigger, enhanced store concepts, they will remain the exception rather than the rule, Beccari clarified.

“Many stores that we open are standard ones, but I believe that where you have the possibility, or where you think it’s strategic, it’s great to be able to open something different – because everything we do now, whether it’s Seoul or what we did in Bangkok or in Shanghai, has an aura that goes beyond the country,” he remarked.

“It’s great that you give signs that Louis Vuitton is somehow different, and somehow it is more linked to its history and culture than other brands,” Beccari said.