Louis Vuitton's fictitious interview

LE FIGARO.

- Mr. Louis Vuitton, thank you for choosing Le Figaro to celebrate your 200th birthday.

Louis Vuitton.

-

I remember very well, when I opened my house in 1854, it was the year of your relaunch, under the leadership of Hippolyte de Villemessant, after twenty years of virtual silence.

The coincidence was too much fun for me to speak elsewhere.

What have you been doing for the past 130 years?

I observed.

I followed everything.

I have learned foreign languages ​​as the house that bears my name has grown.

I couldn't even read French when I arrived in Paris.

I learned English, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Chinese ...

Have you been disappointed?

My house is present in about sixty countries.

If we had to put end to end all the kilometers traveled by all the luggage in my name, who would know which planet we could reach?

Have you been shocked at times?

You know, I learned to take a step back.

But when Stephen Sprouse tags the monogrammed canvas, you must be turning around in your grave, right?

Already, you should ask my son, Georges.

Because I did not know it in my lifetime, the Monogram canvas.

In my time, we celebrated Puvis de Chavannes or Rodin.

I saw the first paintings by Monet and Renoir.

So, if your question is to know if I am artistically sensitive to tags and if I would have entrusted Mr. Sprouse with the facade of my house in Asnières, I will of course answer "

 no 

".

But if I had been a hundred and fifty years younger, it might have been me who would have tagged the walls.

At the Vuitton archives, there are today 30,000 objects, only one of which is from you and nearly 200,000 documents but very few directly concern you.

Isn't that frustrating?

On the contrary !

It is perhaps that, even, which allowed me to enter the legend.

If everything was written, what part of interpretation and creation would have remained with my successors?

I made trunks, not shackles.

In a trunk, we put what we want.

Even if it means putting in what you would never have imagined?

When you become a public figure, when your name is a symbol, you have to accept the fact that you no longer belong to yourself, that others want - and can - speak for you.

I left clues here and there, as little as possible, to remain a little mysterious.

In the novel about your life published by Gallimard, Caroline Bongrand imagines a scene: that of your first emotions with a duchess.

Reality or fiction?

Mrs. Bongrand says it herself: “

 I did not want to do a conceptual story but to show a man who has lived, a being of flesh and blood.

I didn't try to humanize him, I understood that he was human, with all the panoply of emotions and feelings that go with it. 

The rest is up to me… and the Duchess.

Where do you imagine yourself being in two hundred years?

Me ?

Well, in the cemetery of Asnières-sur-Seine, of course.

But my house, I hope it will be on Mars.