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 designerssuch as Takashi Murakami Richard
Prince and Stephen Sprouse as well as designing a line of highly successful and desired
clothing for the company.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.
