This fascinating publication presents the roles two men have played in turning a small workshop in nineteenth-century Paris into one of the most successful and recognized brands in the world.
Known for both craftsmanship and must-have high design, Louis Vuitton the luxury house was started by its eponymous founder in 1854.
The first half of this publication traces the innovations by Vuitton, who turned the little-known guild profession of emballeur (packer) into the foremost luxury trunk maker in Paris, with a clientele that included in his lifetime the French nobility as well as the elite of a prosperous empire. Prime and never-before-seen examples of Vuitton’s craftsmanship, along with the fashion that went into them, are the highlights of these chapters. The second half of the book examines the role of Marc Jacobs as Louis Vuitton’s creative director (since 1997), who took the Louis Vuitton house into a new era with a series of collaborations with artists and designers—such as Takashi Murakami, Richard Prince, and Stephen Sprouse—as well as designing a line of highly successful and desired clothing for the company.
Marc Jacobs (born April 9, 1963) is an American fashion designer. He is the head designer for his own fashion label, Marc Jacobs, as well as Marc by Marc Jacobs, a diffusion line, with over 200 retail stores in 80 countries. He was the creative director of the French design house Louis Vuitton from 1997 to 2014. Jacobs was on Time magazine's "2010 Time 100" list of the 100 most influential people in the world, and ranked number 14 on Out magazine's 2012 list of "50 Most Powerful Gay Men and Women in America".
By examining two divergent but often similar careers one hundred years apart, Louis Vuitton / Marc Jacobs is not only a layered study of the evolution of a luxury brand in the past 150 years but also a celebration of technical and design innovations in the new century.