![]() Most commentators consider Vuitton's trunk the birth of modern luggage. However, the key selling point was that unlike all previous trunks, which were dome-shaped, Vuitton's trunks were rectangular-making them stackable and far more convenient for shipping via new means of transport like the railroad and steamship. Instead of leather, it was made of a gray canvas that was lighter, more durable and more impervious to water and odors. In 1858, four years after opening his own shop, Vuitton debuted an entirely new trunk. The sign outside the shop read: "Securely packs the most fragile objects. A few months after his marriage, Vuitton left Monsieur Marechal's shop and opened his own box-making and packing workshop in Paris. Vuitton and Parriaux married that spring, on April 22, 1854. The transformation was spectacular, but it required all the know-how of the store's department manager since Louis' shoulders were much larger than those of Parisian bureaucrats." ![]() His great-grandson, Henry-Louis Vuitton, later recounted, "In the blink of an eye he exchanged the cloth frock and hobnailed shoes of a worker for the courting outfit of the day. It was in that year that Vuitton met a 17-year-old beauty named Clemence-Emilie Parriaux. Innovative Entrepreneurįor Vuitton, 1854 was a year full of change and transformation. ![]() Upon marrying the Emperor, she hired Vuitton as her personal box-maker and packer and charged him with "packing the most beautiful clothes in an exquisite way." She provided a gateway for Vuitton to a class of elite and royal clientele who would seek his services for the duration of his life. Napoleon III's wife, the Empress of France, was Eugenie de Montijo, a Spanish countess. The re-establishment of the French Empire under Napoleon III proved incredibly fortunate for the young Vuitton. Exactly one year later, he assumed the title of Emperor of the French under the regal name Napoleon III. On December 2, 1851, 16 years after Vuitton arrived in Paris, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte staged a coup d'etat. It took Vuitton only a few years to stake out a reputation amongst Paris' fashionable class as one of the city's premier practitioners of his new craft. A box-maker and packer custom-made all boxes to fit the goods they stored and personally loaded and unloaded the boxes. In 19th century Europe, box-making and packing was a highly respectable and urbane craft. The teenage Vuitton was taken in as an apprentice in the workshop of a successful box-maker and packer named Monsieur Marechal. He arrived in 1837, at the age of 16, to a capital city in the thick of an industrial revolution that had produced a litany of contradictions: awe-inspiring grandeur and abject poverty, rapid growth and devastating epidemics. He traveled for more than two years, taking odd jobs to feed himself along the way and staying wherever he could find shelter, as he walked the 292-mile trek from his native Anchay to Paris. On the first day of tolerable weather in the spring of 1835, at the age of 13, Vuitton left home alone and on foot, bound for Paris. ![]() A stubborn and headstrong child, antagonized by his stepmother and bored by the provincial life in Anchay, Vuitton resolved to run away for the bustling capital of Paris. As legend has it, Vuitton's new stepmother was as severe and wicked as any fairy-tale Cinderella villain. Vuitton's mother passed away when he was only 10 years old, and his father soon remarried. His father, Xavier, was a farmer, and his mother, Coronne Gaillard, was a milliner. Descended from a long-established working-class family, Vuitton's ancestors were joiners, carpenters, farmers and milliners. Vuitton was born on August 4, 1821, in Anchay, a small hamlet in eastern France's mountainous, heavily wooded Jura region. This provided a gateway for Vuitton to a class of elite and royal clientele who would seek his services for the duration of his life and far beyond, as the Louis Vuitton brand would grow into the world-renowned luxury leather and lifestyle brand it is today. When Napoleon assumed the title of Emperor of the French in 1852, his wife hired Louis Vuitton as her personal box-maker and packer.
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