In 1854, surrounded by the political changes that shortly before had led to the foundation of the Second French Empire, Louis Vuitton opened its first own store after achieving professional independence and abandoning the mentorship of Romain Maréchal, its great teacher.
Expert in the manufacture of trunks and considered one of the best in his profession, it did not take long to receive the support of Eugenia de Montijo, empress and wife of Napoleon III, and the couturier Charles Frederick Worthwho helped promote a business model based on sobriety, quality, tradition and durability, and which led Vuitton to absolute stardom before he was even 30 years old.
The products, with levels of delicacy and quality never seen before, were not within the reach of all pocketsso it was the most powerful classes that turned the firm’s designs, many of them already lined with classic checkerboards and monograms, into the favorites of transatlantic voyages that were beginning to become a sign of economic and social power.
Opera singers, landowners with interests on the other side of the Atlantic, musicians, athletes and the artists who little by little began to transform Paris into the world capital of the intelligentsia became the ambassadors of those trunks that filled the first-class compartments of steamships leaving Portsmouth, Southampton, Brest, Nantes and La Rochelle for South America, Africa or Southeast Asia.
As recently pointed out in The Financial Times Michael Burke, CEO of the firm, these personalities made Vuitton “the most famous man in the world that nobody knows anything about”.
One of these trunks, designed in the shape of a boat for the occasion, will be one of the protagonists of the initiatives planned for this bicentennial. As the firm itself pointed out at the official launch of Louis 200, shop windows around the world will be decorated with this trunk, although reinterpreted by 200 artists, such as Jean-Michel Othoniel, Alyssa Carson or Willo Perron, who have shown some kind of relationship with the brand. The trunks will also be framed by a Louis Vuitton triptych, an exclusive creation by Alex Katz.
More disruptive will be the publication of Louis: The Gamea video game already available on Google Play and the Apple Storein which the participants will be able to delve into the exciting history of the house and its founder guided by Vivienne, the flower that in 2017 the brand made highly coveted it-dolls.
Also, the game will have NFT (non-fungible tokens) embedded by Beeple, who last March became the first artist to sell an NFT at Christie’s auction house. “It is a coming-of-age story, about the life of a child who left home under pressure while acquiring skills and taking risks to become who he is today,” continued Burke, promoter of the successful relationship that Louis Vuitton undertook with the videogame League of Legends, one of the most successful in history and for which the firm designed an exclusive cover in 2017. “At that point we realized that our next generation of customers will be intimately related to video games,” explained Burke.
More traditional, however, will be the publication of a novel written by Caroline Bongrand, a French writer, renowned fashion journalist and magnificent screenwriter (she is the author of Eiffelone of the most anticipated and expensive French films of recent years).
In her, The author offers an account of the life of Louis Vuitton from its birth in the Jura until it achieved international fame during the interwar period, when its suitcases were already a symbol of class, power and good taste. The invention of the waterproof leather canvas, the creation of the LV monogram and the flat-top trunks that made it possible to make more efficient the space in the luggage holds of ships and trains around the world, will form part of the literary structure of Louis Vuitton, L’Audacieuxpublished by Gallimard, the great French publishing house.
The premiere of the documentary Looking for Louisscheduled to occur through Apple TV during the month of December, will close twelve months of celebrations in which the figure of the founder of the house stands as “a bridge between the pioneering manufacturer of trunks and all the visionaries who today strive to achieve the goals set”, as Louis Vuitton itself pointed out during the world launch of the initiatives Louis 200. Long live the monogram.