Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster Read Online Free PDF Page A

back then not only built trunks but also packed and unpacked them. Throughout the mid- 1800 s, women wore voluminous gowns with layers of petticoats known as crinolines, made of wool and horsehair, under their skirts or, later, with bustles. The master of such creations was a young Englishman named Charles Frederick Worth, an acquaintance of Louis Vuitton’s who had a dress shop in Paris on the rue de la Paix. Today Worth is known as the father of haute couture. Rather than producing dresses to order like his confreres, Worth designed seasonal collections from which his clients could choose. He was one of the first to stage fashion shows to present his collections, and the first to put a signature label on his clothes. He became luxury fashion’s first true arbiter of style: he dictated what the fashion would be, and the public followed. “Women will stoop to any depths to be dressed by him,” wrote historian Hippolyte Taine at the time. “This arid, nervous, dwarfish creature receives them nonchalantly, stretched out on a couch, a cigar between his lips. He growls, ‘Walk! Turn! Good! Come back in a week and I will have an appropriate toilette for you!’ It is he, not they, who chooses. They are only too content to be dominated by him—and even so they need references.” Worth’s dresses required some fifteen yards of fabric—such as floss silk, painted chiffon, or lamé gauze—and could take three to four hundred hours to embroider. Buttons were embroidered, too, each one requiring three to ten hours of work. His dresses were so popular that he could have a team of thirty seamstresses working full-time for one client all year long. His prices were stratospheric, his vanity legendary: he considered himself a “great artist,” on par with Delacroix. He snidely dismissed clients who questioned his skills, and shamelessly catered to aristocrats above all others. Vuitton so excelled at packing these delicate frocks and baubles that he became the official packer and trunk maker for the empress Eugénie, the extravagant Spanish-born wife of Napoleon III. Having her royal warrant was the ultimate seal of approval.
    Louis Vuitton’s business was doing well enough that by 1859 he needed to expand. He bought an acre of land in Asnières, a northeastern suburb situated on both the rail line to Paris and the river Seine, which allowed for easy receipt of raw materials as well as easy shipping to the store, and constructed a workshop of brick and glass with iron frames and trusses, like those used by French architect Victor Baltard at Les Halles. On the ground floor, Louis had about twenty artisans making trunks. Upstairs, he had a small apartment where he would stay when visiting the site.
    Today, that two-room space serves as the Louis Vuitton Museum of Travel, which can be viewed only by appointment. The windowless gallery is clean and modern, with high-gloss blond wood floors; it traces the evolution not only of Vuitton but also of modern luxury goods. The tour begins with a stack of four old beat-up trunks. The first is the revolutionary Trianon Gray. Shortly after it was introduced, it was copied by the competition. So Louis Vuitton came up with a new canvas design—the second trunk—of red and beige stripes. He later changed the stripes to brown and beige, which have been the house’s signature colors ever since. The third trunk on display is a chocolate brown and beige checkerboard print known today as Damier, designed by Louis’s thirty-one-year-old son, Georges, in 1888 . The words “Marque Louis Vuitton Deposée”—or “registered trademark”—were written in white inside a few of the checks, thus launching luxury branding. And the fourth trunk is the monogram pattern of interlocking LVs interspersed with naïf-style diamonds, stars, and flowers, which Georges designed in 1896 also in response to counterfeiting and registered it as a trademark in 1905 . No one knows for sure where Georges found his