Who was Louis Vuitton? Life of the man who created the most famous brand in the world

It all started as in a fairy tale: with an orphan and an evil stepmother. Louis Vuitton was only ten when his mother died, followed shortly after by his father, in the town of Anchay. The very young boy knew the rudiments of many trades: his relatives had been carpenters, artisans and milliners – all skills that helped him survive when he ran away from home in 1835, at the age of thirteen, headed for Paris in search of fortune. It took him two years to travel a distance of about 470 kilometers, surviving with several occasional jobs, and arriving in the city in the full explosion of the Industrial Revolution that was sweeping Europe. He was only 16 years old when he arrived in the capital French and became an apprentice in the workshop of Monsieur Marechal, a renowned suitcase-maker for the high society of the time. At this point for the young Vuitton began a long apprenticeship, which lasted about 17 years, earning him the reputation of a skilled craftsman and making his travel trunks among the most requested in France.

But hard times also came for the unstoppable Vuitton. Between 1870 and 1871 the Franco-Prussian War broke out, which for two years paralyzed travel and travel, changing the distribution of capital and culminating in the siege of Paris, which left the ruin of the Vuitton laboratories, its workers who died or fled the war and saw a collapse in demand. But when the war was over, Vuitton did not let himself be discouraged: he used the remaining capital to open a new boutique-workshop on Rue Scribe, near the Paris Opera and launched a new line of products with a new beige monogram. The success of the new line was once again extraordinary and the company that now also employed Louis's son, Georges who, after the death of his father in 1892, at the age of seventy, would create in his honor the LV monogram that we still know today.