Louis Vuitton’s cultural baggage

An ongoing exhibition in Paris reveals the dialogue between a luxury luggage brand and the changing technologies of travel

A display at the exhibition. Photo: Stephane Muratet

A few days before the Louis Vuitton (LV) exhibition Volez, Voguez, Voyagez was to open at Grand Palais in Paris on 4 December, I received an email from the brand’s public relations team. It said that in light of the recent terror attacks in Paris, the luxury house had scaled down the events planned to mark its opening. If I wished to cancel my place at the press preview because of any safety concerns, it continued, the brand would be happy to make alternative arrangements.

In a city that is still healing from terror-inflicted wounds, several narratives seemed to be running through and around Volez, Voguez, Voyagez, or “Fly, Sail, Travel”, even before it opened. The show is a panoramic telling of LV’s 160-year-old story, from 1854, its year of inception, to now. It familiarizes viewers with its founders as well as artists, designers and strategists who are creating the Louis Vuitton of the future. Curated by Olivier Saillard of the Musée Galliera in Paris and designed by Canadian opera director Robert Carsen, the exhibition presents objects and documents from Louis Vuitton’s as well as other archives, both public and private. It is artistically narrated around nine chapters.

Cities never really heal from the kind of affliction that Paris was struck with. But eventually they learn to live through it, then with it and then, hopefully, beyond it. More than one member of the LV team involved with the exhibition said that going ahead with the event—instead of cancelling it—had been the brand’s own little display of Parisian defiance. “We want to show that life will go on in Paris,” a manager in the press department said with a tone of considerable and genuine resolve.

Volez, Voguez, Voyagez is an uncommon and thoroughly enjoyable example of a brand-led exhibition that does not succumb to the pitfalls common to this genre. First of all, such shows can exhibit a lack of thematic generosity in which all stories are told purely from the perspective of a brand which can be quite off-putting. Second, brand-led shows can get stuck up in the brand’s own mythology and taxonomy. Products are often displayed in set categories and sections—menswear, women’s wear, travel, sports, business, yachting, skiing, diving—that are not intuitive to anybody who does not work in marketing or sales.

The LV exhibition however ducks these problems through a combination of curatorial sensibility, space design, and measured story-telling.

An expert curator of fashion exhibitions, Saillard has a reputation for subverting curatorial conventions in his shows. His sleight of hand here, so to speak, is to make the LV trunks and bags play the same role throughout the show that they play in real life—as accessories and enablers of eventful luxurious lives. Thus even as the show is ostensibly about LV’s history as one of the world’s great luggage brands, all objects tell stories instead of just starring in them.

The 1906 monogrammed canvas trunk. Photo: Tous DroitsThe exhibition opens with a 1906 vintage trunk in monogram canvas from the family archives as representative of the house’s historical and artisanal background. “The 1906 trunk prefigures the Voguez, Volez, Voyagez...because it brings together all the fields covered, from the perfect gesture to savoir-faire, travel, beauty, creation and avant-garde vision,” says the exhibition note. It is an unambiguous nod to what is still the spiritual, if not financial, soul-object of the company. Also this is a subtle reminder that while the brand is most famous for its monogrammed handbags and tony luggage, its roots lie in workshops and wood and craftsmen. An entire chapter is devoted to the fabric, locks and shapes of the LV trunks.

A Louis Vuitton catalogue photograph from 1927. Photo: Droits RestreintsThese objects, photographs and other memorabilia from the LV archives are placed in a series of rooms. Two stand out. One, early on, is a room dedicated to the founding history of the brand. Much of this wood-panelled antechamber is lined with photos and documents telling the founding stories of the brand from 1854. A display case in the centre of the room holds a selection of wood-working tools. The entire room smells of wood and there is a faint whiff of sawdust in the air. It is a subtle nod to the humble origins of the brand and to the craftsmanship involved and invested in making LV trunks to this day.

The other room of note is a mock, oversized train carriage, with scenery flashing by in flat-screen windows. Louis Vuitton cases and bags sit on baggage racks and along the floor. On the other side of the carriage are replica hotel stickers and baggage tags from the LV family collection. It is an excellent bit of set-design deceit that propels the exhibition’s narrative forward without becoming overbearing.

This narrative structure is the real spine around which the exhibition is built. Volez, Voguez, Voyagez is really all about the ongoing dialogue between the brand and the changing cultures and technologies of human travel. For the first three decades of its life LV made nothing but trunks. Until steamship travel took off, at which point the luggage atelier made its first non-trunk: a steamer bag. These first bags were durable and well- made. But not much to look at. This is because, Cecil the guide told us, steamer bags were never meant to be used outdoors. They were meant to hold laundry and be secreted away inside a trunk.

How ironic then that the successors of that original “private” bag are LV’s most famous “public” products today. The brand’s iconic Speedy and Keepall model bags can be spotted all over the display rooms, including lined up on the wings of a biplane. The displays deftly combine old products from the archives as well as more recent products. Thus a Noé bag from the decades past sits next to a brand new piece from the 2015 collection. The finest of the new products, undoubtedly, is one displayed right at the start, the Petite Malle, a wonderful little clutch inspired by the trunk.

Long before the arrival of Marc Jacobs as the brand’s creative director in 1997 marked the official entry of LV into the fashion world, it was among the most revered brands in the mid-century. The curator’s note mentions the presence of LV in the customer records of French designers Paul Poiret and Christian Dior. To reference that LV was fashionable before it started making clothes, the show includes contemporary silhouettes from Nicolas Ghesquière, artistic director of Women’s Collections.

The most crowd-pleasing of the displays, perhaps, will be one towards the end that showcases Louis Vuitton’s work for Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn and other celebrities. Both the luggage and the stars shine through, but the real pleasure is in the little details. The handles on a set of white combs from a Valise Necessaire instantly invoke American skyscrapers. This is a blizzard of interactions: genre, travel, art, culture, technology and craft.

Like any good museum exhibit, Volez, Voguez, Voyagez is rewarding at different levels of engagement. Glance at the objects and it is a rewarding look back at the story of one of the great luxury brands. Read all the signs and the brochure and the historical details and you get a fine sense of LV’s origins, inspirations and legacy. But linger even longer and the exhibition can become a meditation on travel and culture.

Volez, Voguez, Voyagez is a complex, layered exhibition that will say different things to different people. It should be a part of every Paris itinerary.