The collection of Gaston-Louis Vuitton has just been unearthed
When Gaston-Louis Vuitton died in 1970, the contents of his office were packed up, stored away and eventually forgotten. Vuitton, born in 1883 and the grandchild of the luxury trunk maker Louis Vuitton, ran the eponymous company for more than 50 years and was “the aesthete of the family”, says Patrick Mauriès, a French writer and historian. Over time, as the head of a company that made suitcases, he amassed “a bizarre assemblage of objects related to travel, which he kept in his home and his office”, Mauriès says. “It was sort of a mess — it was stacked by the door, around his desk and so on.”
The collection included board games (Jeu de Paris, a French version of Snakes and Ladders), 19th century carpet bags and more than 800 tsubas, a Japanese sword guard that is often composed of an ornate piece of metal that delineates the sword’s edge and its handle.
Because his heirs chose to store it away rather than sift through it, the collection — left untouched for decades — became a sort of time capsule from one of the company’s most vital, creative periods. Now, the company, which at this point is owned by a luxury goods conglomerate controlled by Bernard Arnault, has “rediscovered” Gaston Vuitton’s collection and catalogued all in a new book, Cabinet of Wonders: The Gaston-Louis Vuitton Collection, edited by Mauriès. The reasons, at least from the company’s perspective, for publishing it are straightforward: The collection hearkens back to the days when Louis Vuitton connoted creativity, not airport kiosks. “I think they’re trying to show every aspect of the Louis Vuitton history,” Mauriès says. “So, with this, they’re now trying to show something that’s less well known. Let’s call it the company’s aesthetic aspect.”
For those less interested in a luxury chain’s brand identity, the book still has value. Page after page of Gaston’s collection — much of which is of negligible monetary value — reveals a cross-section of the aesthetic and material concerns of a highly cultured European, the likes of which are rarely seen in such comprehensive, unsparing detail.
“Gaston’s taste was bound to a certain period,” Mauriès says. “For the first half of the 20th century, you have these collectors who were interested in the artisanal component of creation. [At the time,] the collection didn’t seem that remarkable, but now people are beginning to see that even if the objects seem a little dated, they have a coherence, and they’re worth showing as a whole.”
As the first male heir of the third generation of the family, Vuitton was destined to work at the company, but he developed a broad range of hobbies: designing furniture, sketching landscapes and taking photographs. He also began to collect art, ranging from African masks to Art Deco crystal, and he was a prolific reader, dazzled by the fiction of writers such as J K Huysmans.
Despite the fact that two world wars, the Russian Revolution and a devastating recession kept his company in a near-constant state of flux, Vuitton found time to exhibit his paintings and design perfume bottles. The book includes several of his sketchbooks, many of which were coloured in on graph paper.
He was first and foremost, however, a prosperous merchant, and his extracurricular passions invariably found their way into day-to-day commerce. His membership in the Société des Artistes Indépendantes led to collaborations with lesser-known artists. André Ballet, best known for his book plates, designed crystal bottles for Vuitton; Roger Foy, brother of illustrator André Foy, carved African-inspired ivory knobs for Vuitton walking sticks; and Gaston Le Bourgeois, best known as an Art Deco sculptor, painted panels for Vuitton’s London store.
It was in his store’s window displays that Vuitton’s collec tion really came in handy. Over the decades, he collected hundreds of trunks — everything from massive steel cases to tiny, 16th century embossed metal and red silk boxes from Switzerland. A lovely, early 17th century leather trunk Vuitton bought in 1922, for instance, was “one of the most exhibited items in the collection”, appearing multiple times in the windows of the Vuitton store on Champs-Élysées in Paris and in the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue in New York.
While other objects displayed in the book, such as wooden figurines, dolls and model cars, served a similar purpose, much of the book comprises ephemera that, until recently, was probably considered solely of interest to Vuitton alone. A few pages are devoted to vintage handsaws, and more than a few are dedicated to monograms of clients that Vuitton kept in his archives. It’s a far cry from Louis Vuitton’s current iteration as a fashion behemoth with US$8 billion ($10.8 billion) to US$9 billion in annual sales.
There are also delights: A spread in the book highlights some of the magnificent covers of L’Oeil, the influential art magazine run by Georges and Rosamond Bernier. Elsewhere are fabulous nécessaires, or toiletry boxes, including a stunning 60-piece set from around 1815, which contains silver, crystal and mother-of-pearl accessories.
It is an esoteric, oddly personal collection of objects, one that evinces the hobbies and preferences of Vuitton better than any hagiography ever could. “You can’t see this collection in person, just in the book,” Mauriès says. “It’s about a very specific kind of taste.” — Bloomberg LP
This article appeared in Issue 802 (Oct 23) of The Edge Singapore.
