English princesses had miniature renderings of them made for their dolls. Maharajas preferred to use theirs to store one-of-a-kind tea sets. The earliest regal fan was an empress: Eugénie de Montijo of France. One hundred and seventy years later there is still no receptacle considered to be more stately, striking or stylish than a Louis Vuitton trunk.
Few fashion icons come as densely packed. That’s not just in regard to the broad variety of contents it can carry — caviar! Croquet sets! On-the-go casinos! — but its level of design detail, craftsmanship and history.
Here is a creation that has, over the years and in various guises, been adapted to hold just about anything. Ask one of its keen collectors and they will tell you: this also applies to its desirability and value.
Sotheby’s sold a Yayoi Kusama polka dot-strewn model designed in collaboration with the Japanese artist in December 2023 for £204,600. In April this year a limited-edition red and white monogram Courrier 90 trunk by Vuitton and the iconic streetwear label Supreme went at Christie’s for £75,400.
Those cult contemporary models are certainly cool, but the preowned, vintage varieties are held in equally high regard. This month the curated digital marketplace Catawiki sold a large Vuitton travel trunk dated between 1889 and 1896 for €66,000 (about £56,000). Its new Dutch owner was one of 55 keen bidders. Fleur Feijen, the site’s senior fashion expert, tells me demand is only rising.
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“Last year a Louis Vuitton closet trunk dating back to 1919 was sold on our marketplace for €35,658,” Feijen says. “It was the most expensive interior object [we] sold in 2023.”
“Louis Vuitton trunks speak to multiple types of potential buyers. They show both the history and the craftsmanship of the fashion house,” she explains, citing the brand’s classic Explorer trunk as the holy grail for collectors.
Where these objects are made goes some way to explaining why. The site of Vuitton’s trunk-making operations has remained the same for 165 years. Asnières, a village a few miles northwest of Paris, is where Louis Vuitton moved his booming five-year-old business after outgrowing its Paris-based Rue Neuve des Capucines workshops. The brand’s thriving production line has remained there ever since. Until 1964 so did the Vuitton family.
Asnières is LV’s heart and soul — and where, in 1858, the very first commercial Vuitton trunk was put together. Hundreds of artisans still work there building bespoke special orders and passing down traditional skills and savvy. The location was initially chosen due to its position close to the River Seine, so that it was easier to receive the requisite raw materials and wood.
That earliest trunk was revolutionary when it hit the market. It had a flat lid, rather than the domed lid that was then conventional, which meant it could be easily stacked, and was covered in the house’s ingenious, glue-treated and watertight Trianon canvas. Such clever features, of which several more would follow over the decades, are what put Vuitton trunks at the top of luxury traveller’s shopping list.
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Vuitton, a carpenter and layetier — specialist box maker and packer — innately understood what his distinguished clientele wanted. Their expectations were goals he had learnt to meet his entire career. From 1837 he had apprenticed at the luxury layetier Marechal; then in 1852 was appointed the official trunk maker to France’s Empress Eugénie. The designer was responsible for all her luggage for several years — not just their exterior design, but the separation of any delicates intended to travel within them. These were less suitcases, more made-to-measure, moveable wardrobes.
Such was the norm for wealthy 19th-century tourists. Packing light was hardly an option then: lavish excess was in fashion — as were corsets, extravagant headwear, wooden hoop skirts and voluminous, frothy layers of lace. Trips were largely undertaken by horse-drawn carriage or boat and could last weeks to months. It was the job of Vuitton to ensure every last item arrived in perfect order.
The Vuitton trunk’s original design has itself travelled through time virtually unscathed. To this day they are hand-built around a fût: a frame crafted of layers of light, humidity-resistant poplar, okoume or beech wood. The lining is sewn or glued in. Then come additional decorative interior details determined by the trunk’s intended use: ribbons, leather and lace that could be embossed or dyed. Felt might be used for shoe boxes; velvet for jewellery.
Motifs on outer coverings have varied with age, but their composition has rarely veered from Vuitton’s painted or glue-treated canvas. After the plain grey Trianon came the counterfeit-challenging Rayée — striped — style in 1872. The first woven beige and black checkerboard Damier iteration followed in 1888. This is still found in stores now.
It wasn’t until 1896 that the brand’s famous monogram pattern was introduced. Vuitton himself was too humble to mark his designs with his initials, so his son and business partner Georges created the graphic flower and quatrefoil design after his death. Specialty materials began to appear in the atelier in the late 19th century. Zinc and copper styles were preferred by intrepid explorers, today leather is popular.
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Other developments include smart iron-covered corners and edges, and up to a thousand decorative studs being nailed by hand on the trunk in straight lines. Vuitton’s trunks captured the attention of early-19th-century shoppers because they were stylish, yes — but they were also pioneering. In addition to being waterproof and stackable, they were lightweight. Instead of bulky metal brackets they came with nifty canvas hinges. In 1886 came the “unpickable” spring lock that famously not even Houdini would agree to attempt an escape from.
It’s what Vuitton’s trunks could — and can — carry, though, that makes them masterful. It has designed trunks for transporting all sorts of items, large and small. Ernest Hemingway had a library trunk conceived in the 1920s to hold books and his typewriter. In 1938 scaled-down trunks lined with pink silk were crafted as gifts not for Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret themselves but, delightfully, for their dolls.
In 1926 Prince Youssef Kamal of Cairo and Maharaja Sayajirao Gaekwad III turned to Vuitton for a deluxe picnic trunk and tea case respectively. And in 2008 a trunk to cart caviar was developed for commercial sale, complete with 30-year-old mother-of-pearl ladles and spoons and vodka glasses.
Of all the trunks built as mobile wardrobes, the shoe cabinet conceived for the French opera singer and film star Lily Pons stands out. Developed in 1925, due to the dainty proportions of her feet it had 36 drawers in a trunk that would normally house 30. Each drawer was designed like a shoe box with silk bags and trees; it also had two compartments for stockings.
“Vintage Louis Vuitton has always been highly sought after as people connect to the heritage of the brand, the craftsmanship and the uniqueness that a vintage piece offers,” says Tim Bent of Bentleys London, which stocks exceptional and unusual versions of the travel/lavish interiors accessory.
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“Every trunk has a backstory, it’s just that sometimes that story has been lost in time. We piece together what history we can from snippets of information on the trunks — from old luggage labels, travel stickers and the hand-painted initials of the original owners. Sometimes the pieces fall into place, sometimes they don’t.”
There’s a toiletries kit for the couture designer Jeanne Lanvin (1926); a vanity case for Sharon Stone (2000); trunks for watercolours, flowers — even croquet sets, skateboards and, for the French string quartet leader Pierre Sechiari in 1895, a violin. More than a century later, the pieces on the Louis Vuitton website boast that they can carry a hanging wardrobe, a cocktail bar, a doll’s house, even a pop-up casino.
Louis Vuitton trunks are beautiful and adaptable, clever and useful — just don’t expect to see one on a baggage carousel any time soon.
