Immaculate cups of tea washed down in the Vuitton family parlor, it was time to pop across the way to continue our discovery of Louis Vuitton's Secret Places at the Asnières workshop. The workshop at Asnières is truly the beating production heart of France's premier luxury brand, and has been for more than a century, this is where Vuitton leather goods earn their "Made in France" stamp.
From 1859 until 1977 this was the company’s sole production facility, before growing demand from new markets and for new products meant that additional workshops had to be taken on and the craftsmen and women at Asnières saw their skills reassigned only to Vuitton's most top end of goods, that is to say, the legendary hard-frame trunks, exotic leather bags, limited-edition bags for the runway shows and the ultra luxurious special orders.
Entering the facility on the ground floor, you are greeted, not perhaps as you would expect by the rich smell of raw leather, but by that of dried poplar, your eyes drawn to a floor covered in wood shavings, not scraps of monogram canvas or epi leather. This is where the incarnation of the hard case trunks begins, with their wooden frame, whose base is hand cut and laid right here in Asnières.
A handwritten half-century old chart covered in scrawled measurements denotes the only acceptable formula for the trunk's dimensions, scripted by hand and unchanged over the years, this is what Louis Vuitton's DNA as manifested at Asnières, and in fact, by extension, that of luxury brands themselves, is truly all about.
Working your way up the stairs past the woodworkers, you enter a world inhabited by the finest leather craftsmen Europe has to offer. Scrolls of recognizably printed epi leathers in all the colours of the rainbow are stacked, one on top of the other, ready and waiting to be taken into expert hands.
The workshop is flooded, like the house next door, with natural light, and was renovated in 2005. Though the sprawling space has evolved since the time of Louis himself, the array of tools and techniques utilized by its 185 craftsmen have remained virtually the same since the beginning.
Here techniques, be it tooling the keys and locks by hand, hammering in LV rivets to secure corners of trunks or polishing crocodile for catwalk-ready bags and clutches, the time-honoured skills here have been passed down from one generation to the next, from masters to apprentice, year in, year out, the tradition of creativity and craftsmanship is constantly renewed.
In addition to the steamers, the workshop at Asnières also handles all of Louis Vuitton's Special Orders, the ultra luxurious ultra exclusive tradition which has always set the brand apart, catering to even the most unusual requests from their patrons, from a legendary foldout trunk-bed designed by Louis and Georges Vuitton for expeditions to far-flung corners of the globe to the intricate Monogram vanity case created for the American film star Sharon Stone and a book trunk for none other than Ernest Hemingway.
Resplendent with the world's finest exotic skins (I beheld a stingray and a python skin twice as long as the length of my flat), the department is personally overseen by Patrick-Louis Vuitton, representing the fifth generation of the founding family. If you can dream it (and pay for it), Vuitton will make it for you--so long as your heart's desire doesn't fly in the face of the house's refined sense of decorum.
Louis Vuitton distinguishes between two types of Special Orders: "Made-to-Order" and "Custom-Made." Made-to-Order is a service allowing for variations on selected items from the permanent collection – typically, a bag executed with a material, lining or finishes of a different colour, or personalized with a customer’s initials.
Custom-Made is where the company, and its customers, can give free rein to their imagination, and where the skills of its craftsmen find their fullest expression (MJ for instance, had a trunk custom made for his pooches and the World Cup is housed in just such a case).
Custom-Made items are true one-offs, original ideas – some modest, others grand in scale, and some truly bizarre – that must gradually take shape through detailed sketches and elaborate prototypes and can take as long as a year to execute. All such orders are executed in Asnières, which completes around 450 items a year. Each piece is the recourse of a single expert craftsman, who overseas the order from beginning to end.
The final part of Vuitton's heritage that is housed under the glass and steel-beamed roof of Asnières is their Museum of Travel, which curates the history of the house's relationship with travel, which, when viewed curated as such, leads one to the conclusion that the history of Vuitton evolved side by side with that of modern travel.
To trace the heritage of the trunk, and the brand's evolution thereafter to accommodate ever evolving forms of transport (rail, road and eventually air), one can return to the sense of excitement and adventure that permeated last century and the one prior, when travel itself was just as much a luxury as a custom-made Vuitton trunk.
Inaugurated in the late 1980s, the museum has always remained private, open only to company personnel and special guests. Celebrating the golden age of the luxury liner, the sea travel section exhibits, alongside the legendary Steamer Bag, a ladies’ Wardrobe trunk created in 1924 and, also from that year, a cabin trunk in Monogram canvas which, at just 33 cm high, was designed to fit snugly under a bunk.
A highlight of the air travel section is an early Keepall in plain canvas (not until 1959, with the development of a supple waterproof coating, could soft bags be made in Monogram canvas). Originally conceived in the 1920s as a spare holdall, the Keepall had a revolutionary cylindrical design enabling it to be folded away when not in use. The rail theme, meanwhile, spotlights a Roma suitcase in natural cowhide and a crocodile and sealskin toiletry case made in 1935 for the French singer Marthe Chenal.
However, it was the romance of the road that inspired some of the company’s most ingenious creations, notably the circular “driver bag”, designed to fit in the centre of the spare wheel, and the Excelski and Excelsior trunks from the 1920s, both forerunners of the modern car boot. At that time, a number of leading car manufacturers were based near Asnières, and it was not unusual for a customer to order his car before moving on to the Vuitton workshop to order his luggage.
The visit then segues into a section devoted to exploration in every sense of the word, world exhibitions and special orders, which includes the famous Vuitton trunk-bed, a trunk for 1,000 cigars ordered by an American connoisseur, the bags created by top fashion designers for the centenary of the Monogram canvas, and a chic BMW C1 scooter with a built-in Monogram Vernis hatbox. Last but not least, a separate section of the Museum houses the private collection of Gaston-Louis Vuitton, the grandson of the founder, who over the course of his life amassed around 200 travel articles dating as far back as the end of the XIV century.
A collection of books, including rounded up literary theory and philosophy, that Vuitton packaged and printed for customers to fill their luggage with and read on the voyage,, completed this vision of a gentler kind of travel in a more civilized age.
Thus it stands that a visit to Asnières, Louis Vuitton's "Secret Places," reveals a truth so simple and traditional that it is in fact, not a secret at all. Louis Vuitton, the man, the brand, its patrons, its craftsman and indeed anyone touched by the LV logo, are truly inhabitants of the modern world. The house remains not only an icon of luxury, but also of the exhilaration of adventure, and the joyous experiences of the world that that luxury can help facilitate. So much so that in the annals of history, the hard-case trunk as hand wrought here in Asnières, in my esteem, has just as much a rightful claim to icon of modernity as the steamship itself.
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