Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster Read Online Free Page B
Author: Dana Thomas
Tags: Social Science, Popular Culture
walking some bits of canvas for jewelry boxes from one station to another. Pierre had joined the company about a year and a half earlier, after a short stint in computers. He had visited the Vuitton factories in the provinces and was so moved by the craftsmanship that he asked Vuitton owner Bernard Arnault for a job. Arnault said, “Of course.”
“I love this company,” Pierre told me. “It’s in my veins.”
And then he got back to work.
L UXURY AS WE KNOW IT today is rooted in old Europe’s royal courts—primarily those of France, which set the standards for lavish living. In the seventeenth century, French king Henri IV’s second wife, Marie de Medicis, wore for the baptism of one of her children a gown embroidered with thirty-two thousand pearls and three thousand diamonds. Louis XIV dressed in satin suits with velvet sashes and frilly blouses, high-heeled shoes or boots, and wigs of flowing curls topped with ostrich-plumed chapeaux. To maintain control over his courtiers, he dictated to them what they could wear, when to wear it, and how to wear it. He declared what height necklines should be, and the length of gown trains. To please the king, the ladies of the court wore wigs so tall that their servants stood on ladders to assemble them.
Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, personally encouraged and supported the luxury artisans and helped found the Sèvres porcelain factory to provide the Château de Versailles with its royal services. Louis XVI’s wife, Marie-Antoinette, overran her annual clothing budget of $ 3.6 million by buying gowns encrusted with sapphires, diamonds, silver, and gold—but according to observers, it was money well spent. She was “an object too sublime and beautiful for my dull pen to describe,” wrote John Adams, a U.S. diplomatic envoy to France in the late 1770 s and later the second American president. “Her dress was everything that art and wealth could make it.” Napoleon’s wife, the empress Josephine, spent half of the $ 15 million France earned selling the five-hundred-million-acre Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803 on clothes in ten years. “French fashions must be France’s answers to Spain’s gold mines in Peru,” declared Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, for whom today the Committee Colbert, the French luxury brand trade association, is named.
It was in the world of nineteenth-century French aristocracy that Louis Vuitton was able to rise from nothing to the world’s most famous luxury travel brand. Louis Vuitton himself was born in 1821 to a family of farmers and millers in the Jura, a mountainous region at the foot of the Alps in eastern France. At the age of thirteen, Vuitton set out by foot for Paris, then the city of opportunity. The 292 -mile trek took two years; along the way, Louis earned his keep by working as a stable boy or kitchen hand. When he finally arrived, Paris was a booming town of one million, a city of opulent palaces and horrific slums. “Here you find at the same time the greatest luxury and the greatest filth, the greatest virtue and the greatest vice,” the pianist Frédéric Chopin wrote to a friend, according to Paul-Gérard Pasols in his book Louis Vuitton: The Birth of Modern Luxury.
Vuitton became an apprentice to a master trunk maker named Monsieur Maréchal on the corner of the rue Saint-Honoré and the rue du 29 Juillet—the site today of the trendy fashion boutique Colette. In 1854 , Vuitton quit, opened his own business on the rue Neuves-des-Capucines (now known simply as the rue des Capucines), and set about reworking the basic design of the trunk. He changed the traditional domed lid to a flat top (to allow for easy stacking on the backs of coaches) and replaced the leather, which turned moldy and cracked, with lightweight poplar covered with a waterproof dove gray cotton canvas he developed called Trianon gray, after the Grand Trianon Palace at Versailles.
Trunk makers
“I love this company,” Pierre told me. “It’s in my veins.”
And then he got back to work.
L UXURY AS WE KNOW IT today is rooted in old Europe’s royal courts—primarily those of France, which set the standards for lavish living. In the seventeenth century, French king Henri IV’s second wife, Marie de Medicis, wore for the baptism of one of her children a gown embroidered with thirty-two thousand pearls and three thousand diamonds. Louis XIV dressed in satin suits with velvet sashes and frilly blouses, high-heeled shoes or boots, and wigs of flowing curls topped with ostrich-plumed chapeaux. To maintain control over his courtiers, he dictated to them what they could wear, when to wear it, and how to wear it. He declared what height necklines should be, and the length of gown trains. To please the king, the ladies of the court wore wigs so tall that their servants stood on ladders to assemble them.
Madame de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV, personally encouraged and supported the luxury artisans and helped found the Sèvres porcelain factory to provide the Château de Versailles with its royal services. Louis XVI’s wife, Marie-Antoinette, overran her annual clothing budget of $ 3.6 million by buying gowns encrusted with sapphires, diamonds, silver, and gold—but according to observers, it was money well spent. She was “an object too sublime and beautiful for my dull pen to describe,” wrote John Adams, a U.S. diplomatic envoy to France in the late 1770 s and later the second American president. “Her dress was everything that art and wealth could make it.” Napoleon’s wife, the empress Josephine, spent half of the $ 15 million France earned selling the five-hundred-million-acre Louisiana territory to the United States in 1803 on clothes in ten years. “French fashions must be France’s answers to Spain’s gold mines in Peru,” declared Louis XIV’s finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert, for whom today the Committee Colbert, the French luxury brand trade association, is named.
It was in the world of nineteenth-century French aristocracy that Louis Vuitton was able to rise from nothing to the world’s most famous luxury travel brand. Louis Vuitton himself was born in 1821 to a family of farmers and millers in the Jura, a mountainous region at the foot of the Alps in eastern France. At the age of thirteen, Vuitton set out by foot for Paris, then the city of opportunity. The 292 -mile trek took two years; along the way, Louis earned his keep by working as a stable boy or kitchen hand. When he finally arrived, Paris was a booming town of one million, a city of opulent palaces and horrific slums. “Here you find at the same time the greatest luxury and the greatest filth, the greatest virtue and the greatest vice,” the pianist Frédéric Chopin wrote to a friend, according to Paul-Gérard Pasols in his book Louis Vuitton: The Birth of Modern Luxury.
Vuitton became an apprentice to a master trunk maker named Monsieur Maréchal on the corner of the rue Saint-Honoré and the rue du 29 Juillet—the site today of the trendy fashion boutique Colette. In 1854 , Vuitton quit, opened his own business on the rue Neuves-des-Capucines (now known simply as the rue des Capucines), and set about reworking the basic design of the trunk. He changed the traditional domed lid to a flat top (to allow for easy stacking on the backs of coaches) and replaced the leather, which turned moldy and cracked, with lightweight poplar covered with a waterproof dove gray cotton canvas he developed called Trianon gray, after the Grand Trianon Palace at Versailles.
Trunk makers