Louis Vuitton: a book revealed the casa/atelier of Asnières-sur-Seine
His debut in history was not triumphant, since the name of Asnières, collected in a papal bull of 1158, indicated a land so arid that it was used as pasture for donkeys. Luck changed when, six centuries later, Marie-Madeleine de Vieuville, a favorite of Philip of Orleans, decided to build a castle on the same land.
A few more years and the Parisians, who live only eight kilometers away, discovered the beauty of Asnières-sur-Seine and, on the banks of the Seine River, opened one of the most elegant rowing clubs in the capital. They were happy days among licentious groves and many restaurants and establishments for people to cool off (in the style of Luncheon of the Boating Party, the famous painting by Pierre-Auguste Renoir). When Louis Vuitton arrived in Asnières in 1860everything was prepared for this small city to receive him as the new king of the Art of living French, that is, elegant even on the road. Her godmother was Eugenia de Montijo, wife of Napoleon III, who entrusted her jewelry and her wardrobe to the already famous Vuitton trunks and in his company he traveled from the Tuileries Palace to the Château de Saint-Cloud, passing through the most famous vacation spots. The impeccable taste of the last queen of France, even when it came to luggage, set the standard for her, and her students included Sarah Bernhardt; Pietro Paolo Savorgnan di Brazzà, who explored the Congo in 1880; Ernest Hemingway, for whom he created his library chest with desk; Mary Pickford; Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph, and Charles Lindbergh, who in 1927 flew from New York to Paris, crossing the ocean alone and without luggage except for his two Vuitton trunks.
If he had wanted to discover the secret of his suitcases, why they were so beautiful, so elegant and so elite and tailor-made, Lindbergh, along with the Maison’s future supporters—ranging from Marlene Dietrich to Cary Grant to Anna Magnani and Audrey Hepburn—would have had to return to where it all began, to Asnières, to Louis’s house and his workshop, which once overlooked Rue du Congrès, now renamed Rue Louis Vuitton. One hundred and thirty years following the death of the founder, the book Louis Vuitton. manifestations edited by Nicholas Foulkes, published by Assouline (also in a limited edition of 500 numbered copies in a poplar case), tells the wonderful story of this secret in 400 pages and splendid images. It is the marvelous pleasure of being artisans and still building by hand in the third millennium, of choosing and caressing the materials, of learning and passing on, as young students alongside the great masters of manufacturing, in the plural, how many excellences of Louis Vuitton there are today in Europe and America: leather goods, jewelry, haute couture, ready to wear masculine and feminine, perfumes and watches.
Louis Vuitton had also been an extraordinarily talented student and at the age of sixteen he had started working in the workshop of Monsieur Marechal, a manufacturer of trunks and suitcases, a true malletier. Louis had arrived in Paris on foot, traveling the four hundred kilometers that separated him from Lavans-sur-Valons, in the Jura, where he had been born in 1821, of a miller father and obviously evil stepmother, as in all fairy tales, even those in which Cinderella is born as a man. At thirty-three, in 1854, Louis married seventeen-year-old Clemence-Emilie Parriaux. Along with their marriage came a new professional maturity, Louis opened his workshop and in 1858 invented a shape that revolutionized elegance of travel: it is no longer a curved trunk, but a rectangular shape, with rounded edges, practical, stackable and waterproof thanks to the Trianon gray waxed canvas.
It was a resounding success and as the rail system in Europe developed hundreds of orders came in and a larger workshop was needed. In Asnieres, the barges they carried the poplar boards with which the famous trunks were made, and by rail to the Gare Saint-Lazare, the same trunks returned to Paris. In the years when the station was painted by Monet y Vincent Van Gogh and Georges Seurat met along the Seine, the Vuitton family also felt the call of art and it was Georges Vuitton, the son, who asked Hector Guimard, master of the Art Nouveau, a project for a new villa. The flowers are everywhere, in the lilies that bloom in the windows, in the garden that becomes a room, and the columns spring up to the ceiling. Among the rooms, we find Chester sofas, Ming chairs, Chinese ceramics, oriental mahogany tables with mother of pearl inserts. In 1896, four years following his father’s death, Georges invented the famous LV monogram and incorporated it into a Japanese-inspired pattern of circles and flowers. They are so iconic It makes you want to travel every time you read those two letters.
Article originally published in AD Italy.
