It’s not a surprise that a brand rooted in travel found a way to touch down in New York.
Louis Vuitton hosted a cocktail party Thursday at its 57th Street temporary flagship to celebrate the launch of “From Louis to Vuitton,” the brand’s latest tome, published by Assouline. The event centered around a panel between Pierre-Louis Vuitton, the brand’s head of savoir-faire and sixth-generation descendant of the founder, and author Arthur Dreyfus, moderated by Vogue’s Nicole Phelps.
“This book tells the last 25 years of the history of Louis Vuitton, and 25 years is also the amount I’ve spent working at Louis Vuitton,” Vuitton said in an interview. “It talks about all the fashion shows, the history of Louis Vuitton, but also the story of the lock, for example, all of which are very important to the maison.”
In the past two-plus decades, Vuitton recounted the changes in technique, which he called a combination of “tradition and innovation.”
“From Louis to Vuitton.”
Courtesy of Louis Vuitton
“Nowadays, I’m here to keep tradition,” he said, pointing to the hard-sided luggage crafted in the original workshop in Asnières, France. “The method is the same, the fabrication is the same, only raw materials have changed. We make trunks as tradition, but we also have a lot of innovation. We started making trunks because we needed them to travel on boats. After that, we needed to travel in cars, so we invented the Alzer. After that, we needed to travel by plane, and now have rolling luggage. We always innovate to adapt the luggage to the travel. It’s important for us to be able to respond to the need of the client.”
Vuitton often gets to be one of those arbiters, saying that roughly 30 years ago, he flew through New York to stay a month in the U.S. before the brand offered rolling luggage. “They often ask me to carry a new one to test, and of course I do,” he said. “They know that I push the test to the maximum. I don’t see our luggage as a Louis Vuitton bag, I see luggage as luggage you need to carry and that needs to assist you.”
Those themes of versatility and craftsmanship carried over into the panel. Dreyfus, for example, adapted the book’s sequence to the more contemporary periods it covers in the brand’s history. “The way to create it was like a Rubik’s Cube,” he said. “You can shuffle it in many different ways, you can open it at any page and learn something about an aspect of Louis Vuitton. I also thought of it as an Instagram feed in a way.”
Dreyfus described the brand’s founder “as some kind of Mark Zuckerberg, some kind of pioneer. Someone who had a bigger idea than his time.”
What have later become the brand’s hallmarks were, at one time, revolutionary, the duo agreed. “When Louis Vuitton started making trunks, there were more than 200 trunk makers in Paris,” Vuitton said, calling out the choice to incorporate stripes, Damier canvas and to put the brand name on the rivets.
Inside “From Louis to Vuitton.”
Courtesy of Louis Vuitton
“I was a big reader of Roland Barthes, and he would have a lot to say about the importance of this maison and the paradigm of luxury itself,” Dreyfus said. “Maybe the most prominent information about Louis Vuitton is when George Vuitton created the monogram. He thought of using his own initials, but decided to pay tribute to his dad. That was a very strong move.
“At the time, when you bought a very expensive and luxury trunk, it was to put your own initials on it to differentiate it from other travelers. He created this monogram to create something extremely singular. It was, in a way, a very risky move, beause clients at the beginning didn’t understand why they would pay a lot for luggage with other initials on it. It was not at all a traditional thing, and it explains the huge success of Louis Vuitton in a way. George, without knowing it, created modern luxury.”
