DEEP WITHIN

Imprinting multiple identities onto Louis Vuitton’s iconic creation pays tribute to its founder’s visionary soul.

By RADHINA COUTINHO


If one ever had to choose a fitting metaphor for the mind of a creative genius, a trunk could serve as a strong contender. A repository of your most personal items, indispensable necessities for a journey – whether physical, emotional or spiritual – selected to accompany you as you voyage through every new chapter in your life.

For Louis Vuitton it’s perhaps fitting that his most emblematic creation – the LV trunk– was chosen by the eponymous house he founded in 1854 as the vehicle to celebrate his visionary spirit during his bicentennial year.

The LV trunk was reimagined hundreds of times by its original creator – somehow managing to be both iconic yet undisputedly individual. Louis was called upon to create carrying cases to encase items that were true extensions of their owners’ selves – from famed conductor Pierre Sechiari’s precious Stradivarius to portable libraries designed for lengthy Transatlantic journeys, providing travelers with both intellectual sustenance and companionship on the long days on the waves. His beautiful creations served to both conceal and protect their owners’ most personal possessions, while simultaneously signaling to the world that they were precious enough to warrant the creation of a made-to-measure carry case.

Each owner imprinted his or her own identity on their trunk – and therein lay the seed of 200th year celebrations, marking the birth of the house’s visionary founder in 1821.

With Louis 200, the venerated French fashion house asked 200 creative minds to reimagine the form of an LV trunk in a manner that pays homage to Louis Vuitton’s synergetic spirit. The creative endeavor also salutes the many, truly revolutionary collaborations that have marked the tenure of a brand that today is synonymous with true luxury – collaborations with proven genius as well as exploratory endeavors with emerging talent.

“Imagine having a conversation with not just one visionary, but 200,” said Faye McLeod, Louis Vuitton’s visual image director. “There’s an exceptional energy that emanates from them – this constant flow of creativity. People will really sense the feeling of celebration,” he added.

The collaborative call out has been effusively embraced by individuals who have made their mark on a myriad of artistic avenues – everyone from Susan Miller, astrologer to Hollywood’s biggest stars, to yo-yo world champion Gentry Stein have attempted to distill their interpretation of originality into the form of the iconic LV trunk. The resulting 200 creations perhaps best reveal that magical quality of a traveler’s trunk – a relatively non-descript item that can hold within it all manner of unimaginable beauty, often only hinted at by its individual form.

This quality of simultaneously concealing and revealing is perhaps one of the reasons why Syrian-born Swedish conceptual artist Jwan Yosef was invited to lend his unique perspective to the project. It’s a subject that he revisits regularly in his work. Representation features strongly in his repertoire – one element standing in place of another – whether this be old family photographs or powerful cult images that contain the emotion of collective memory.

Speaking about his contribution “A Study for Touch” to the Louis 200 celebration of creativity, Yosef says it was all about “revealing what was not meant to be seen, almost undressing an object”. With the trunk itself he chose to play with the canvas, painting large portraits using sweeping bold brushstrokes, stretching them up and then unravelling them before draping them onto a trunk shape, in a way revealing the rawness of the object that is not meant to be seen. “It’s a play of choosing to cover, or to dress, and in this way I think it became undressed?” says Yosef.

This play of hidden, often mystical influences on the creative spirit is what revered astrologer Miller, too, chose to focus when creating her unusual LV trunk. The interior of her trunk features a to-scale representation of the solar system as it looked at the time Louis Vuitton was born on August 4th 1821, in the early hours of the morning.

According to Miller, Vuitton was destined for greatness from birth, with a brilliant chart that revealed enormous creativity, a quest for excellence in quality and detail, and the ability to encourage greatness in others. Her unusual interpretation of Vuitton’s well-aligned stars serves to underscore the mercurial mix of talent, luck, timing and foresight that tend to mark the life of any great maverick. Like the artistic drive itself, the opportunity for interpretation of the brief has proved truly limitless, stepping back into the trunk’s heritage as well as daring to imagine its bold future.

Take LA-based interiors and entertainment designer Willo Perron’s response. "I wanted to take the form of this object that was created 200 years ago and transform it into something contemporary and futuristic,” says Perron. “Will the trunk of the future walk itself to its destination? Will it open up and unpack and then re-pack itself? When it’s not being used, can it live as a beautiful object that sits in your home? How do you take such an iconic object and transform it for the future?"

Perron’s answer involved the creation of a solid aluminum box – a very simple, polished object from the outside that opens to reveal a dramatic robotic-like interior filled with mobile parts that almost “dance” together, in Perron’s own words – a nod to his background in the performance arts, visually almost resembling the rigging of a concert stage.

If Perron’s creation imagines the future of the trunk, others such as Lebanese composer Zad Moultaka, delved deep into their own pasts for inspiration. His “wonder trunk” recalls the innocent magic of a simple fairground staple.

“Fifty years ago, in my grandmother’s village, I see myself running again with other children, 25 piastres in my hand behind an old man dragging a ‘wonder box’ on a roulette wheel. 25 piastres for a ticket gave us the right to look through the two holes inside the trunk, for a few minutes. All kinds of images scrolled slowly and carried us to a magical journey that emerged in front of our amazed eyes. What is more challenging and poetic than to recall this memory to celebrate the two hundred years of Louis Vuitton?” says Moultaka.

Moultaka went back to Vuitton’s portrait to complete the concept. “Using Vuitton’s eyes as the main element to imagine the outside of the trunk was obvious,” he continues. “The motif of Vuitton’s eyes is duplicated and repeated in a particular rhythm to create a feeling of dreamlike dizziness and hallucination.”

Moultaka’s trunk features two holes – representing the pupils, meant to “sharpen our curiosity as ‘voyeurs’ and induce us to look and discover what is happening inside the trunk. Poetic landscapes scroll slowly in front of our eyes, they are made from fabrics, clothing and other traveler’s belongings filmed in close‐ups, becoming sea, dunes and mysterious mountains. When the trunk opens a little melody is played like a music box conducting the magic of this intimate journey,” concludes Moultaka.

This amalgamation of past, present and future – intertwining dreams and hopes with a philanthropic spirit for a better tomorrow – is the common thread that runs through the 200-year celebration; not just finding its voice in the charitable element that lies at the heart of the project that will enable young individuals from across the globe to discover the arts, but also in the reimagination of the trunks themselves.

French sculptural artist Amande Haeghen’s LV trunk personifies this idea of time, layering, imprinting. Haeghen built up layers – each bearing the imprint of the previous one – by mixing materials such as earth, glass, metal, plaster, and pieces of wood. The structure so created is reminiscent of that of a trunk, “crystallizing this notion of time and imprint of the past but also on the future,” she says.

"200 years remind us that against time, no one can do anything. The realization of this passing time, sedimentation, a process in which particles of any matter gradually stop moving and come together in layers. These layers that are created, year after year, to form a universal memory, that of the earth and our imprint. So many thicknesses, like the pages of a book telling us the story, our story. It is in this spirit of accumulating experiences and exchanges that I deeply believe in exploring this idea of sedimentation of memory and mimesis,” says Haeghen.

The idea of imprinting of identities is something that has run through Louis Vuitton’s illustrious heritage – finding its voice in the many avant-garde and unexpected collaborations that have punctuated the house’s history through the ages, and marking its ability to reinvent and transmute itself to appeal to an ever-wider audience – one that stretches across borders, stylistic persuasions and senses of selves.

From Marc Jacobs and Sprouse’s landmark reinvention of the sacrosanct LV logo, imprinting Sprouse’s own trademark acid pink graffiti scrawl on its iconic form, to the many iterations of the LV trunk that have embodied their creators’ artistic drives, this synergistic exercise has once again underscored how the notion of creativity and identity can be unpacked in many different ways.

Somehow it feels like Louis would have approved.