FIRST-CLASS RETURN
How Louis Vuitton’s flagship store has been reborn burnished with bold, bright artworks
Fortuitously for aesthetes seeking further visual enlightenment after Frieze has drawn to a close, Louis Vuitton’s magnificent Mayfair maison reopens at the end of this month – and it is almost as much art gallery as it is atelier. Continuing a great tradition, while also looking to the future, today the house is best known as a global luxury brand. Yet one can still simply step in to the store and commission an individual trunk – just as clients would have done in the 19th century when the Vuitton name was associated purely with bespoke leather luggage.
After all, this is the company from which Matisse ordered his custom-designed suitcases, and was the name of choice for European art dealers, whose chests were fitted with slim, flat drawers for conveying delicate canvases and framed sketches as they crossed the continent. Since then, some of the world’s most imaginative and avant-garde artists have linked arms with the brand: the photographer Dora Maar carried the ‘Marceau’ tote in the 1950s; in 2012, Yayoi Kusama set store windows alight with her cult crimson-and-white spotted collaboration; and, two years later, Cindy Sherman dreamt up a ‘studio in a trunk’, which the Vuitton workshop duly crafted.
Luminaries of fashion, film and literature, from Elsa Schiaparelli and Greta Garbo to Christian Dior and Ernest Hemingway, have also carried cases made by the Paris atelier. As such, it seems fitting that the reimagined flagship on Bond Street brings together these different disciplines under its roof. The extensive, four-storey site has been conceived by the architect Peter Marino, who has worked with the house since 1994. ‘Here, we have moved away from all the brown wood we used at the beginning,’ he says. ‘There has been a real evolution towards something lighter, clearer and, dare I say, happier.’ His design is a masterclass in the power of paring back: clean-cut, voluminous spaces clad in the palest French stone provide a quiet backdrop for the spectacular treasures that hang from its walls and rails.
At seven metres wide, one of the most striking of these is a sitespecific canvas by the New York-based artist Sarah Crowner, for which she drew inspiration from a graphic 1960s tapestry by the Swedish modernist Lennart Rodhe. ‘These colours are even sharper and brighter than I usually use; I wanted a bold strength to hold the space. I like the dynamic push and pull between a painting and its environment, which is particularly interesting in a store. Think of Andy Warhol’s shop-window displays or the ones by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns,’ she says. ‘When they look at it, I’m hoping people will feel energised by the buoyant forms and vibrancy.’ Crowner regularly works with seamstresses – for this piece, 57 panels painted coral, fuchsia, teal and white have been stitched together. ‘I pattern-cut like a tailor would. The work is almost like a suit or gown that has been stretched onto a frame,’ she reflects. ‘So there’s this great connection.’
Other highlights include a serene off-yellow Andreas Gursky and a rainbow custom-fit staircase by the Scottish artist Jim Lambie, but for those wishing to acquire as well as admire, there will also be the full range of Louis Vuitton’s wildly inventive, travel-inspired furniture collaborations – the ‘Objets Nomades’ – available for the first time in the UK. These range from coffee tables by the Parisbased designer India Mahdavi to sculptural paper and leather lamps