Masters At Work

from AIR Magazine - Nasjet - February'23

OBJECTS OF DESIRE

Assouline’s beautiful book pays homage to the talent and time-honoured craft inside Louis Vuitton’s storied workshops

WORDS: NICHOLAS FOULKES

When asked about the quality that most defines Louis Vuitton, chief executive Michael Burke has no doubt. “Fundamentally, it’s not about luggage, it’s about innovation. Innovation came before luggage. The reason why Louis went into business himself is because he wanted to innovate and create something different than what was on the market.”

He is also convinced that Louis Vuitton has played a crucial role in retaining France’s hard-won, jealously guarded and centuries-old supremacy of skills. “Had we not insisted on making the great majority of our leather goods in France thirty years ago, leather goods manufacturing would have moved to Italy, just like silk left Lyon and went to Como, and watchmaking left France and established itself in Switzerland.”

And just as in the seventeenth century, artists and artisans lived and worked within the Louvre itself (Boulle crafted his innovative furniture in a suite of rooms once belonging to Anne of Austria), so at Louis Vuitton the artists and artisans whose skill and ingenuity have contributed to both the success of the marque and the prestige of France pursue their various métiers in surroundings that confound the customary notion of what constitutes an atelier.

Amidst a world leached of colour and character by the received orthodoxy of business school and subject to the tyranny of quarterly results, at Louis Vuitton the idea flourishes that a workshop can be a place of fulfilment and individuality, a place where traditional craft skills can be learned, respected, continued and transmitted by those who defy the outdated image of the elderly craftsman hunched over his workbench.

“They are people who love making stuff with their hands,” explains Burke. “They just love it, they love every minute of it, and they’re young, they’re so young. Twenty years ago, we had trouble finding them, because kids did not believe that making things was a worthwhile gig. Now they look at it and say, ‘this is the best gig in town,’ and they’re happy and they’re laughing. The great majority of them are kids now, very different than when I started, when everyone was old! Now I am old, and everyone is young.”

Ours is the age of the celebrity creator, the disruptor, the artistic polymath… a type of deism that exalts the creative to hitherto unimagined heights of fame worshipped daily by millions of devout followers in the virtual church of social media.

But it is worth reflecting that while anyone can have an idea, the skilled hands of trained artisans are needed to give those ideas the gift of life. Without Louis Vuitton’s resources and artisans, Virgil Abloh’s illuminated colour-change Light Up Keepall would still exist only as a mental image. Instead, using timehonoured techniques and technical ingenuity, a bag from the 1930s was propelled into the future.

“When you spend time with these new, transgressive individuals, these twentyfirst-century creative types, they all have one thing in common. They are all in awe of the past, they wouldn’t be successful if they hadn’t learned from the past,” explains Burke. “Everyone sees them only as disruptors, but if they were just disrupting, they wouldn’t be successful for long. The reason why they are successful is because they are disrupting by taking people back. Instead of copying the past, they are understanding it and serving it up in a twenty-first century way.”