Louis Vuitton

Louis Vuitton is the world’s largest luxury house and, by most estimates, the most valuable luxury brand on the planet. It is LVMH’s flagship, and it draws more monthly website traffic than any other name in our ranking of the most popular luxury brands online. The company has been making bags and trunks in Paris since 1854.

It is a trunk maker that has solved the same problem for more than a century and a half.

Behind the brand

History of Louis Vuitton

Louis Vuitton walked to Paris from the Jura as a teenager and apprenticed as a layetier, a craftsman who built fitted cases for wealthy travelers. He opened his own workshop in 1854 and, four years later, introduced a flat-topped trunk covered in waterproofed gray Trianon canvas. It stacked for rail and steamship holds where the old domed trunks could not, and it made his version the travel standard.

His son Georges ran the anti-counterfeiting arms race. He patented a pick-proof tumbler lock in 1886, introduced the Damier check in 1888, and drew the Monogram canvas in 1896, combining his father’s initials with the quatrefoils and flowers that still cover the bags today. The pattern designed to defeat copyists became the most copied pattern in fashion.

Louis Vuitton merged with Moët Hennessy in 1987 to create LVMH, now controlled by Bernard Arnault. Marc Jacobs arrived in 1997, launched the house’s first ready-to-wear, and started the artist collaborations that reframed the brand for a younger buyer. Nicolas Ghesquière took women’s in 2013, Virgil Abloh’s 2018 appointment to menswear turned the men’s shows into cultural events, and Pharrell Williams stepped into that role in 2023.

The Louis Vuitton collection

The Speedy and the Neverfull carry the volume, and both are older than they look. The Speedy launched in 1930 as a compact, city-sized version of the house’s travel bags, and Audrey Hepburn famously asked for the smaller Speedy 25 in the 1960s. The Neverfull is a tote launched in 2007 whose shape comes straight from the house’s trunk-shaped luggage. The Alma, drawn in 1934 and named for a Paris bridge, and the Capucines, launched in 2013 and named for the street of the first store, rank above them. The Dauphine and the leather Petite Malle, a wearable trunk introduced by Ghesquière in 2014, round out a range we rank in full in our guide to the best Louis Vuitton bags.

Hard luggage is still made, still to order in the historic Asnières atelier outside Paris, and still the most expensive thing the house sells.

Fragrance is the quiet giant

Fragrance is now one of the most searched parts of the house. The brand returned to perfume in 2016 with in-house perfumer Jacques Cavallier Belletrud and a workshop in Grasse. The men’s colognes Imagination, Ombre Nomade and Pacific Chill and the women’s scents like Symphony draw hundreds of thousands of searches a month between them. A bottle runs in the mid hundreds. That is the least expensive way into the house short of a keychain.

Craftsmanship and materials

Monogram canvas is not leather and was never meant to be. It is a coated cotton canvas. That is why it shrugs off rain and scuffing far better than the vachetta leather trim that ages into a honey patina around it. Understanding that one difference is most of what you need to know about owning one.

Louis Vuitton makes its leather goods in its own workshops across France, Spain, Italy and the United States, and it runs a repair network that will replace handles, trim and zips on bags decades old. Nothing is made in China. The house does not discount, so the retail price holds and the outlet market does not exist.

How to spot a fake Louis Vuitton

Start with the monogram, the stitching and the leather. On a genuine bag the Monogram canvas is symmetrical and positioned so the pattern runs unbroken across the seams, the stitching is small and dead even, and the vachetta trim is raw, untreated leather that darkens over time rather than arriving pre-tanned. Bags produced before March 2021 carry a stamped date code inside; the house replaced that with an embedded microchip, so a brand-new bag with a stamped code is a red flag. Because Louis Vuitton never wholesales, any bag sold outside its boutiques and official site is secondhand or counterfeit, and the counterfeit volume is enormous.

Where to buy Louis Vuitton

Buy from Louis Vuitton’s own boutiques or its official site, and nowhere else at retail. The house does not wholesale to department stores or authorize third-party sellers, so anything listed as new elsewhere is suspect. For a pre-owned bag, use a specialist reseller that authenticates before it lists. Our guide to the best designer bags of all time sets the house against its peers.

Louis Vuitton price

Louis Vuitton prices above the mid-market Italian houses and below Hermès. Small leather goods start in the low hundreds, the Speedy and the Neverfull run in the low thousands, and the Capucines in exotic leather climbs into the five figures. The brand never discounts, so the tag is the price, and an unusually low one is a warning rather than a deal. Prices are lower in France than in the United States, and non-EU visitors can reclaim the VAT on departure. A bag bought in Paris can end up costing well over 20 percent less than the same one at home.