Louis Vuitton: totem and taboo close panel open panel Plume Le Figaro APP -icon-512px V1 1-style / logotypes / Le Figaro / apps / Jeux

EN COLLABORATION AVEC LOUIS VUITTON - Louis est devenu un personnage public. Sa maison appartient à un inconscient collectif mondial: à chacun son Vuitton, à chacun son interprétation. Dans l’imaginaire créatif de ses successeurs, qu’est devenu l’héritage du fondateur?

After Louis, the generations of Vuitton succeeded themselves at the head of the company, in the greatest respect for the entrepreneurial values left by the patriarch.Everyone brought their stone to the building, according to the evolutions of times and societies, without moving away from the original plan, perfectly idolatrous.

Louis’s heritage is a user manual from which the Vuitton has perpetuated the mind and the letter.Georges will leave for London, like Louis for Paris - although in better conditions.He developed an inviolable throat lock model, continuing his father's work on the issue of security.He imagines the monogram canvas for the same reasons as Louis, the checkerboard.He accompanies the boom in the automobile as his father that of rail transport.He continued the medal collection with international exhibitions.

Marked by Art Deco, Gaston imagines real scenographies for the windows, undoubtedly in memory of the stacks of trunks of his grandparents.He pushes to his climax the passion for compartmentalizing Louis by creating garnished ceremonial boxes, worthy of a bridges and road engineer.And so on.

In the early 1990s, on a certainly different scale and with an obviously extended catalog, Louis Vuitton remains extremely close to Louis Vuitton of the origins.Because, among the precepts of the founding father, there is one that none of the heirs has never dared to follow: rebellion.

However, it is on a break that the Vuitton adventure begins, an almost Oedipal act: the questioning of the paternal authority for the love of a deceased mother, too quickly replaced.When Louis slams the door, it's a bit of a slap in the ancestors.Did they get kicked out, the following generations who dare not kill the father?The one who will break everything in the barrack is exogenous.

It is born at a time when technical progress on the coated canvas allow massive development of flexible bags and gradually inscribe the LV monogram and its flowers quadrilobed in the collective unconscious.It's Marc Jacobs.

Dare everything

He arrived in 1997 to draw the first lines of ready-to-wear of the house.It’s not a vuitton, it’s not even a Frenchman.It has been about fifteen years since he evolved right, left, in the New York underground world, a little trash, fundamentally grunge.Always late.And fatty hair.The kind of guy to whom a vuitton would never have entrusted his children's custody.Or his ancestors.

But, at that time, Louis' sons had no voice in the chapter.Bernard Arnault is Chairman and CEO of the LVMH group.He named Yves Carcelle at the head of Vuitton.The two men are not afraid to commit a crime of lese majesty by recontextualizing Louis and his house, in an era which has nothing to do with that of the origins.

The first parades, Marc Jacobs takes his marks: he returns to the gray canvas of the origins, he thinks a cool, chic woman, and modernizes leather goods with new materials, he is just beginning to have fun with the iconic pattern hechanges the proportions.

And then, once installed, he will go.Franco.Without fear.And without reproach either, by the way.This monogram canvas erected in totem for more than a century, this bourgeois symbol that he saw too much in his childhood, he will have him tag with the bomb by his friend the Street Artist Stephen Sprouse, as a rebel teenager would havemade on the facade of a building in the beautiful districts.Or as Marcel Duchamp had grimted with a mustache the portrait of the Mona Lisa.

L.H.O.O.Q.then titled the master of the ready-made.This may also be what Marc Jacobs thought of historic customers.So he refreshed all of this.From the Takashi Murakami Mangas Tout Kawaii Murakami to the Borderline nurses whose headdresses spell the name of Louis Vuitton.Would he have imagined being thus helped, our patriarch who would have been 187 years old, that year?

Advertising will accompany the imagery of the creator in all its audacity: homoerotic images with a sadomaso tendency to Mikhail Gorbachev in front of the Berlin Wall.Sky is the limit?Not even: in 2009, Buzz Aldrin and Jim Lovell, two travelers of the Mission on the Moon Apollo 13, accompanied by Sally Ride, the first American woman to have ventured into space, mark a campaign that still rejects theHouse adventure spirit.

The message is clear: as for the first large transatlantics, the first cars, as in the time of the rise of railways or airlines, if one day man travels in space, Vuitton theaccompanied.And that, Louis would be proud of it, that's for sure.

Everyone has their Louis

En s’affranchissant de la lettre pour n’en garder que l’esprit, les trois hommes - le créateur, le patron et le propriétaire - ont propulsé la marque dans le XXI^e siècle, faisant de Louis Vuitton le moteur du premier groupe de luxe au monde. Avec ce savant équilibre entre iconoclasme et iconolâtrie, la maison n’a pas renié sa figure tutélaire: elle a fait de l’audace de Louis la raison de Vuitton.

Today, Michael Burke and the creators have taken over the torch.Without taboos.Everyone has created their own mythology around the inheritance of the founder.They all have their Louis with whom they installed a singular dialogue.

Since 2012 that Jacques Cavallier-Belletrud has been master perfumer of the Malletier, he hung on his office one of the two portraits that exist from Louis Vuitton."I say hello to him every day," he starts during our conversation.We have a common language on the definition of things, beautiful, respect for the customer.We share moments of enthusiasts: he was an artist with craftsmen's methods.We have homework in relation to that, and the first is to innovate, create, surprise, surprise, be up to what it was. "

Arrived in 2013, Nicolas Ghesquière praises the creative environment left by the founder: "What I like, at Louis Vuitton, is the richness of heritage, which stimulates creativity, as well as the unique know-how of the unique know-howArtisans, who encourages innovation, he assures.I feel free to interpret everything, to explore all creative and stylistic universes, because the values of audacity and experimentation are at the heart of the house. "

Virgil Abloh, men's artistic director since 2018, identifies with the founder: “The symbolic history of the passage of Louis in adulthood, when he leaves the family house to join Paris, echoes my own journey and myCreation approach, he analyzes.Through the idea of childhood, I often wonder what creates the locker room of a man, how silhouettes change, from early childhood to adolescence and adulthood.Rather than the product, I want human experience to be in the foreground of my work. "

Francesca Amfitheatrof took the artistic direction of jewelry and watchmaking in 2018. At the beginning of 2020, she worked on Bravery, 90 pieces to celebrate the 200 years of the founder: "Draw this collection during confinement M 'has brought a very intense relationship with Louis, she recalls.I imagined this young man cross France on foot, I wandered, I walked by his side.I live in the middle of nowhere, my children are the age he was then, and this strange parallel made me continue a dream: to know him. "

In the history of this man, everyone has found enough to feed legend.Everything has become totemic.And taboo, it would only be one: look at the past with nostalgia.