Louis Vuitton was born on 4 August 1821 in Anchay, in the commune of Lavans-sur-Valouse in the Jura, into a family of millers, carpenters and farmers. His mother, a milliner, died when he was ten, and his father soon afterwards. After a difficult relationship with his stepmother, he left home in the spring of 1835, aged 13, and set out for Paris on foot, taking odd jobs along the way. He covered about 470 kilometres and arrived in 1837, as the capital was being transformed by the railway and the industrial age.
There he was apprenticed to Monsieur Maréchal, a box-maker and packer. In an era of horse-drawn carriages, steamships and new railway lines, packers were skilled artisans who built cases to order and packed the wardrobes of wealthy travellers. Within a few years Vuitton had a reputation among fashionable Parisians as one of the best in the trade. After Napoleon III re-established the empire, Vuitton became personal box-maker and packer to the Empress Eugénie, who asked him to pack her most beautiful clothes "in a quite exquisite way". The appointment opened the door to an aristocratic and royal clientele that would sustain him for the rest of his career.
In 1854, the year he married Clémence-Émilie Parriaux, he left Maréchal and opened his own workshop near the Place Vendôme. The sign outside read: "Securely packs the most fragile objects. Specialising in packing fashions." His innovation was practical. Most trunks of the time had rounded leather lids, designed to shed rain, which made them hard to stack. Vuitton made flat-topped trunks covered in a grey canvas, known as Trianon, that was lighter, more durable and water-resistant, so they could be stacked in the holds of ships and luggage vans. Demand grew quickly, and in 1859 he moved his workshops to Asnières-sur-Seine, outside Paris, where the house still makes special orders and where the family home stands.
Success brought imitation. Vuitton responded with a succession of canvases designed to be difficult to copy, a striped design and in 1888 the chequered Damier, which carried the words "marque L. Vuitton déposée". Security was another concern. With his son Georges he developed locks that were difficult to pick, culminating in the tumbler lock of 1886, each one registered to its owner so that a single key could open all of a client's luggage. The firm exhibited at the Expositions Universelles, winning a bronze medal in 1867, opened a London shop in 1885 and in 1871 moved its Paris shop to the rue Scribe, near the new opera house.
Louis Vuitton died on 27 February 1892, aged 70. Georges took over the business and in 1896 introduced the Monogram canvas, with the founder's initials and floral motifs, as a further defence against counterfeiting and a tribute to his father. Under later generations the family firm grew into one of the world's best-known luxury houses, and in 1987 it merged with Moët Hennessy to form LVMH. The founder's flat canvas trunk remains the house's emblem.
