Vuitton builder’s passions catalogued in new book

Luxury fashion icon’s tastes reflect how famed company developed its ‘esthetic aspect’

When Gaston-Louis Vuitton died, the contents of his office were packed, stored away and forgotten.

Vuitton (1883-1970), the grandchild of the luxury trunk maker Louis Vuitton, ran the eponymous company for more than 50 years and was “the esthete of the family,” said Patrick Mauriès, a French writer and historian. Over time, as the head of a company that made suitcases, he amassed “a bizarre assemblage of objects related to travel, which he kept in his home and his office,” Mauriès, said. “It was sort of a mess — it was stacked by the door, around his desk, and so on.”

The collection included board games (Jeu de Paris, a French version of Snakes and Ladders), 19th-century carpet bags, and more than 800 tsubas, a Japanese sword guard that is often composed of an ornate piece of metal that delineates the sword’s edge and its handle.

Because his heirs chose to store it away rather than sift through it, the collection — left untouched for decades — became a sort of time capsule from one of the company’s most vital, creative periods. Now, the company, which at this point is owned by Kering, the luxury goods conglomerate controlled by Bernard Arnault, has “rediscovered” Gaston Vuitton’s collection and catalogued all in a new book, Cabinet of Wonders: The Gaston-Louis Vuitton Collection, edited by Mauriès. (The book will be available for purchase on Sept.17.)

The company’s reasons for publishing it are straightforward: The collection hearkens back to the days when Louis Vuitton connoted creativity, not airport kiosks. “I think they’re trying to show every aspect of the Louis Vuitton history,” Mauriès said. “So with this, they’re now trying to show something that’s less well known, let’s call it the company’s esthetic aspect.”

Page after page of Gaston’s collection — much of which is of negligible monetary value — reveals a crosssection of the esthetic and material concerns of a highly cultured European, the likes of which are rarely seen in such comprehensive, unsparing detail.

“Gaston’s taste was bound to a certain period,” Mauriès said. “For the first half of the 20th century, you have these collectors who were interested in the artisanal component of creation.” At the time, he said, “the collection didn’t seem that remarkable, but now people are beginning to see that even if the objects seem a little dated, they have a coherence and they’re worth showing as a whole.”

Vuitton developed a broad range of hobbies: designing furniture, sketching landscapes and taking photographs. He also began to collect art, ranging from African masks to Art Deco crystal, and he was a prolific reader, dazzled by the fiction of writers such as J.K. Huysmans.

It was in his store’s window displays that Vuitton’s collection really came in handy. Over the decades, he collected hundreds of trunks — everything from massive steel cases to tiny, 16th-century embossed metal and red silk boxes from Switzerland. A lovely, early 17th-century leather trunk Vuitton bought in 1922, for instance, was “one of the most exhibited items in the collection,” appearing multiple times in the windows of the Vuitton store on Paris’s ChampsÉlysées and in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue in New York.

A few pages are devoted to vintage handsaws, and more than a few are dedicated to monograms of clients. It’s a far cry from Louis Vuitton’s current iteration as a fashion behemoth with annual sales from $8 billion to $9 billion (U.S.).

It’s an esoteric, oddly personal collection of objects, one that evinces the hobbies and preferences of Vuitton better than any hagiography ever could. “You can’t see this collection in person, just in the book,” Mauriès said. “It’s about a very specific kind of taste.”