Louis Vuitton Celebrates Art Deco Legacy with Paris Exhibition

PARIS – As Paris marks the centenary of the Art Deco movement, a new exhibition highlights Louis Vuitton’s role in creating high-end travel accessories for the leading lights of the Jazz Age.

The French luxury brand is showcasing 300 rare items from its archives in the “Louis Vuitton Art Deco” show that opens on Friday at LV Dream, the exhibition space located opposite the Samaritaine department store. 

Designer Jeanne Lanvin’s vanity case, vintage perfume bottles, and a personalized trunk created for couturier Paul Poiret are among the treasures displayed across eight rooms.

But the real star of the exhibit is arguably Gaston-Louis Vuitton, the grandson of founder Louis Vuitton, who set the stage for its present-day positioning as a “cultural” brand. 

“Gaston-Louis Vuitton, who was himself the artist in the family, led the way by bringing artistic collaborations into the house for the first time,” said Bleue-Marine Massard, curator of the exhibition.

In addition to steering the visual identity of Vuitton in the 1920s, via everything from product design to window displays, he was tasked with overseeing the area dedicated to leather goods and travel cases at the International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts of 1925 – the event that cemented the French capital’s reputation as the trendsetter for modern decorative arts. 

Decorators, manufacturers, magazines, department stores, artists and foreign governments flocked to Paris to show off their latest creations, drawing more than 16 million visitors. 

Arts Meets Beauty

Vuitton had a unique flair for design, as evidenced by the brand’s stand at the Grand Palais, which is evoked in the second room of the exhibition. Draped in green and gray velvet, it featured glass cases with grooming sets and trunks that echoed the vitrines of the Vuitton building, then located at 70 Avenue des Champs-Elysées, which nowadays houses a Sephora flagship.

Under his watch, the house of Vuitton tapped designers such as Pierre-Émile Legrain, Camille Cless-Brothier and Gaston Le Bourgeois to design objects such as crystal and silver flacons, octagonal brushes and vanity mirrors.

“Gaston really added that artistic flair. Under his guidance, objects became truly beautiful and refined,” said Massard. “He injected a sense of elegance and exceptional craftsmanship, working with some of the most fashionable and talented artisans and makers of the period.”

The exhibition features grooming sets once owned by musicians Igor Stravinsky and Ignacy Paderewski, made from rare materials like tortoiseshell, ivory and crocodile skin, which nowadays are restricted or banned to protect endangered species. 

Among the highlights of this section is the Milano beauty trunk, with its striking array of white geometric brushes set against a red lining. Together with a 1920s dressing table designed in collaboration with Legrain, it provided much of the inspiration for Vuitton’s recent foray into beauty, starting with a makeup line designed by Pat McGrath.

“We only know of two examples: this one, which was acquired just a few years ago, and another that Karl Lagerfeld bought around the same time. That one’s hard to trace now, but it’s especially significant for the house because of its iconic touch of red,” Massard said of the dressing table, which is displayed next to a flapper dress by Lanvin. 

A Trove of Documents

Documents on display range from pack shots and advertisements to Thérèse Bonney’s photographs of women, their hair cropped into fashionable bobs, sitting at their vanity tables. Much of the material was gathered by Gaston-Louis Vuitton himself.

“What’s really remarkable about Gaston, and a goldmine for us historians, is how obsessively he documented everything the house produced. He photographed absolutely everything. So for us, it’s not just about seeing how things were presented at the time, but also having an incredibly rich, detailed and complete record of all the house’s creations,” Massard said.

“Gaston was really the house’s first archivist,” she added. “He’s the one who laid the foundation for what would become the heritage collection. He was endlessly curious and collected everything he could get his hands on.”

Among the exhibits is a notebook containing his handwritten account of how his grandfather arrived in Paris on foot at the age of 16 and secured an apprenticeship with a box-maker and packer named Monsieur Maréchal. 

There are also his treatises on window displays, published in trade journals at the time, and color sketches of the striking shopfronts he designed for the Paris flagship between 1925 and 1929, drawing crowds of curious onlookers. The canvas and leather Champs-Élysées travel bag, displayed in a glass case, is an example of the type of product sold at the time. 

A series of smaller women’s handbags marks the birth of Louis Vuitton’s leather goods in the early 1920s: minaudières in silk with lurex threads, evening purses with cabochon clasps in moiré silk, and wallets made of seal leather. These designs continue to reverberate today, as evidenced by contemporary designs included in the show.

In one display case, vintage grooming sets are displayed alongside later reinterpretations by Marc Jacobs, including shagreen clutches from the 2005 Les Extraordinaires collection, and Nicolas Ghesquière, the brand’s current artistic director of women’s collections, who has embraced the Art Deco spirit with designs like a black evening bag with a graphic enamel clasp.

The final room celebrates the art of travel during the Roaring ’20s, through photographs, clothing cases and recent clothing, including looks from Ghesquière’s cruise 2020 collection, inspired by New York’s Art Deco skyline; Jacobs’ reinterpretations of porter uniforms and travel attire, and suits by Pharrell Williams, creative director of menswear at Vuitton. 

Items from Gaston-Louis Vuitton’s collection will also be featured in the “1925-2025: One Hundred Years of Art Deco” exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, set to open on Oct. 22.