France was still recovering from the bloody and divisive Napoleonic wars only two decades prior. The only attire – fashion would be the wrong word – he might have seen are the hats made by his mother, and perhaps uniforms made for the military nearby. Rather, he will have worked dawn until dusk helping his hatmaker parents, who also owned a small farm. The young working-class Louis probably did not attend school. In other words, Anchay was not a place where people had much vision, experience, or chance of progress. Many inhabitants of his hometown travelled no further than Thoirette, a market town six miles down the road – an ironic birthplace for the man who would found the most famous travel product company in history. Louis Vuitton, however, grew up in the French village of Anchay on the opposite side of the Jura, about 170 kilometres away from this ever-growing nucleus of Swiss watchmaking. Neuchatel, for example, was already home to the revered master of watchmaking, Daniel Jeanrichard, by the late 1600s. Even then, the Jura was known as a historic area of watchmaking, particularly the towns of Neuchatel, La Chaux-de-Fonds and Le Locle. Louis Vuitton was born in 1821, starting life in a small village in the Jura mountains. Nevertheless, as that model indicates, the avant-garde approach to watchmaking was in the air from the very beginning.ĭrawn by Gae Aulenti, exclusively developed by IWC. Prior to that point, Louis Vuitton’s sporadic release of timepieces, such as travel clocks and the inspirational Gae Aulenti’s quartz-powered Monterey I in 1988, were few and far between. Upon the launch of its first mechanical watch, it had almost no history to its name. Louis Vuitton, however, took a different path. The second manufacture based in Le Locle, where quality management takes place since 1996 Suddenly armed with a marketable history, alongside all the knowledge and expertise that comes with it, the leather goods and writing instrument manufacture steadily grew into a highly reputable watchmaker, with numerous Montblanc pieces already revered by collectors. A successful example, of course, is Montblanc, with its acquisition of the Minerva manufacture back in 2007. Other leading international fashion houses have tried to create their own legitimate Swiss timepieces and failed. This would lead, eventually, to the creation of the Fabrique du Temps in 2010, which would become the perfect example of how to crack the impossible code: establishing a fashion brand as a reputable player in the Swiss watch industry, without casting off its high-fashion cape. In 2002, however, the very core of the brand was altered as it brought an ambitious new vision to life: creating its own Swiss mechanical watch. The Vuitton family with staff in Asnières, Through the ages, this company has calculatedly grown and adapted to the times almost impeccably. The company founded in Paris in 1854, by an ambitious man from impoverished rural France, who would make trunks for Napoleon III’s family, and whose designs would go on to seduce Coco Chanel, Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Kennedy. We are here to understand the real Louis Vuitton. Forget the queues going round the corner and burly bouncers at the door. In order to understand this article as a watch enthusiast or a collector: forget the Louis Vuitton stereotype.
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