While preparing for their long-awaited One More Haim Tour for their album Women in Music Pt. III and in the market for an outfit—“normally on our tours we would just wear what was in our suitcases, but with this one we really wanted a uniform,” Alana says—they fell in love with a pair of black leather pants from Vuitton’s fall-winter 2022 women’s collection, buttery and buckled with a high-waist silhouette. “There’s nothing short of high kicks happening onstage,” says Este. “And I think the big question was, can we do these high kicks in these leather pants? And the answer is yes.”
“We actually found out later that we are the only ones that have the pants,” Alana says. After the runway sample, Louis Vuitton produced only three pairs to the sisters’ measurements. They topped them with black bralettes (also by Vuitton) and performed, they say, more than 60 shows in them, from Las Vegas to London—where they were joined by their good pal Taylor Swift, plunderer of past lives and layer of Easter eggs, for a mash-up of their song “Gasoline” with her “Love Story.” She, too, donned the leather pants. “We have the three, and there’s one in existence that she wore,” Alana says. The sisters still own their pairs. The fourth is back in the Vuitton archive.
All major fashion houses catalog their pasts, amassing a repository of brand codes and bygone collections. But for Vuitton, historically a trunk maker that only expanded into fashion in 1997, the archive is of particular relevance—it is a fashion brand that emerged from the beautiful rubble of its history.
In the mid 1830s it took the teenage Louis Vuitton two years and nearly 300 miles on foot to travel from his childhood home in Anchay, France, to Paris; there he apprenticed with a master box maker, began working for the empress, and in 1854 created the company that would bear his name for many years to come. The brand’s rise coincided with that of the 20th-century travel boom. “People wanted to discover the world to learn from the other, from the outside country, from the foreigners,” the archivist Samuel says. “So they began to think about great expeditions.” Vuitton created luggage to accompany these travels, but the family were self-mythologizers and collectors too. Louis’s son Georges created the iconic linked LV monogram, and his son, Gaston-Louis, gravitated toward antique trunks and objets related to travel.
Many fashion houses began to seriously consider the preservation of their archives in the 1980s, when the rise of fast fashion and industrialized techniques created a looming fear of loss. “It was at this moment that everybody has discovered that the know-how, the savoir faire, is important to preserve because it has begun to disappear,” Samuel says. With Gaston-Louis, the Vuitton archive had a significant head start. And already, the past had long served as inspiration. In the 1900s Louis Vuitton began to produce flaconniers, small cases with structured compartments designed to hold perfume bottles—in the 1920s the house released its first scents. “The first idea was to pack perfume,” says Samuel, “and then we made perfume.”
In this year’s fall-winter collection, marking 10 years designing for the brand, Ghesquière unleashed a whirlwind of the time-warped and revisited, not only riffing on motifs from his own past collections but actually printing images of historic trunks—including a 1924 automobile trunk used by Citroën—onto silk and cotton to create sculptural trompe l’oeil dresses, and on the modern silhouettes of new handbags. In his very first Vuitton collection, Ghesquière shrunk archival trunks, including a custom one made for the 19th-century banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn, into adorably tiny boxy purses: the iconic Petite Malle that remains one of Vuitton’s best-known bags.
From left: Ghesquière’s trunk dress from fall-winter 2024; Kahn’s 1929 photography trunk, one of LV’s early custom projects; the Petite Malle, an instant It bag introduced in 2014 and inspired by Albert Kahn’s trunks.Courtesy of Louis Vuitton.
Besides its recognizable shape, the classic Petite Malle is distinguished by three stylized X’s that appear on its corner, Kahn’s personalization for his own trunks. Here, the snake again eats its tail, because back in 1912, Kahn embarked on an impossible venture of his own: He wished to document the entire world—“a kind of photographic inventory of the surface of the globe, occupied and organized by man, such as it presents itself at the beginning of the 20th century”—in the utopian hope that knowledge would promote a better understanding between cultures. He dubbed the 19-year project Les Archives de la Planète.
Dipping into his deep coffers, Kahn deployed nearly 15 photographers, making use of the Lumière brothers’ new techniques in color imagery to produce a mind-bending 72,000 autochromes, a process requiring beakers of chemicals and fragile glass plates—prime cargo for Vuitton’s packing prowess. The project came to an end in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash, but thanks in part to the protective casings of Vuitton luggage, the fruits of his labor live on in Le Musée Départemental Albert-Kahn and its online archive: A rug maker works a loom in Algiers, soldiers await warfare at Le Hamel, a woman splits a betel leaf in Hanoi, horse-drawn carriages pause outside the New York Public Library.
