Le Voyage

When Louis Vuitton opened his first shop in Paris in 1854, he began by selling flat-topped trunks, lightweight and airtight: the rounded lids of earlier domed trunks allowed water to run off but made them impossible to stack. This innovation amounted to a genuine revolution, and, aided by its careful aesthetics, his work was widely acclaimed. It was his son who, in 1888, created the chocolate-and-beige checkerboard canvas bearing the “Louis Vuitton déposée” mark, winning the gold medal the following year at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. In 1896, in response to counterfeiting, Georges decided to change the pattern, introducing the famous monogrammed canvas with interlaced “LV” initials, scattered with stars and flowers in the naive style drawn from late nineteenth-century Japonisme.