The Journey of Luxury
August 2021 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Louis Vuitton, the man whose name has become the very essence of luxury. This is his story.
ONE BOY’S JOURNEY
Born on the 4th of August 1821, Louis Vuitton the boy was just a few months shy of fourteen when he decided to leave home in pursuit of making it big in the big city. Home was a little hamlet called Anchay in the French Jura area, a harsh, isolated wooded mountain region located between France and Switzerland. The big city of his dreams was Paris.
Louis came five generations of carpenters, millers and farmers, and was himself a skilled carpenter, a trade that was to be his ticket to success. Although Paris was 292 miles away from home, the distance didn’t deter the determined boy’s pursuit of a new life. So in the spring of 1835, with but a few meagre belongings and a dream, he began his journey to the French capital. His mode of travel? His feet.
And so he walked, navigating his way from town to town. Throughout his journey, Louis would take on odd jobs along the way to sharpen his skills and observe the changing world around him. Soon enough, in 1837, after two years of walking the teenager finally made it to his destination.
Paris was a city of extreme wealth and extreme poverty. Eager to make his mark, the smart and savvy lad took his talents to the upwardly mobile area around the Place de la Madeleine and Rue Saint-Honoré, where he would soon find employment with renowned trunk-maker and packer, Romain Maréchal. This proved to be the ideal training ground for the boy. As he honed his craft for Monsieur Maréchal, Louis Vuitton was also given a front-row seat to the social, political and economic shifts within the capital, allowing him to visualise and plan the ensuing road map to his future.
WHERE THE LEGACY BEGAN
Mid-19th century Paris was an era of grandiose dresses, all crinolines and wide skirts, fashion that had to be handled by only the most deft of hands particularly when it came to packing them for transport and travel. From the very beginning, Louis Vuitton viewed himself as a “packer” of fashions and due to his passion and skills, he would soon rise to become one of the most sought-after trunk-makers in the city. To the point that the Empress of France herself sought his services as her personal trunkmaker and packer, leading to his recognition among the city’s other royals and elites.
Eventually, 17 years after arriving in Paris, Louis Vuitton would leave Monsieur Maréchal to pursue his own business, opening his eponymous maison at No. 4 rue Neuve-des-Capucines, in the heart of the Place Vendôme, in 1854. He was 33.
Louis Vuitton was truly passionate about his chosen vocation, and was constantly thinking of new ways to improve on the art of trunk-making and packing fashion. He would go on to revolutionise the industry, proposing a better alternative to the traditional domed trunk when in 1858, he introduced what would become the signature Louis Vuitton trunk.
Born out of practicality, unlike its bulky predecessors this new trunk was rectangular, fitted with a flat lid to enable ease of stacking. Thinking a step ahead, Louis finished the trunk with cloth covered in oil paint to offer some measure of waterproofing.
Lighter, stronger and more convenient than other trunks in the market, demand for the LV trunk skyrocketed. Louis soon realised that he was in need of a bigger atelier.
Thus, a year after the debut of his iconic trunk, Louis Vuitton expanded his business to a larger workshop in Asnières, a village to the northwest of Paris. The move proved to be a bold stroke of genius. Its location on the banks of the Seine eased the delivery of raw materials such as the poplar wood required for his trunks. Apart from the river, a more modern mode of transport presented itself in the form of the country’s very first railway lines, one of which passed through Asnières and onwards to the Gare Saint-Lazare, not too far from his store in the city.
And this was where the Louis Vuitton legacy was ensured. The Asnières atelier became the heart of the Louis Vuitton savoir-faire. The sacred grounds that would birth all Louis Vuitton trunks, luggage and special commissions from clients from around the world. Each one conceptualised and crafted by hand in Asnières.
Apart from exceptional craftsmanship, design was always one of Louis Vuitton’s strongest suits. The success and popularity of the LV trunk unfortunately bred imitators, and this spurred Louis to produce more elaborate, complex designs to discourage counterfeits. From the grey cloth he originally used on his first trunk, Louis transitioned to coloured stripes until later in 1888, he produced the famous checkerboard print we now recognise as the Damier print.
The more popular LV print, the Monogram, was designed in 1896 by Louis’ eldest son, Georges-Louis Vuitton. As a tribute to his late father, Georges interlaced his father’s initials, added motifs of an encircled rounded flower and another of a four-petal flower enclosed within a concaved diamond to produce one of the first instances of luxury branding at its finest. That that very print would go on to become the very symbol of luxury the world over after more than a hundred years after its creation just speaks to the lasting legacy of that young boy from Anchay who wanted nothing more than to make a name for himself through his talents and ambition.
THE ASNIÈRES ATELIER TODAY
More than a century and a half since its inception, the Asnières atelier remains as Louis Vuitton’s greatest institution. In fact, many of the techniques and manual gestures practised by the artisans on a daily basis here have not changed over the centuries, a testament to the enduring quality of work Louis Vuitton had insisted on from the very start. The act of applying glue ever so carefully to the Monogram canvas to stretch it across the wooden structure of a trunk. The nailing of the rigid lozine on the edges and corners. Affixing the malletage on the inside of the trunk lid. The very history and heritage of the man that would become the brand still echoes within these wall, inherited through the army of men and women of all ages and backgrounds that find joy and equal passion in producing Louis Vuitton pieces for the world.