1940s Louis Vuitton Saks & Cy New York Leather Trunk

This trunk was made by Louis Vuitton in the 1930s or 1940s, when the house was still run by the founder's family: Georges Vuitton led it until his death in 1936, followed by his son Gaston-Louis. It is covered in the Monogram canvas that Georges had designed in 1896, trimmed in saddle leather and fitted with brass corners, two brass latches, a keyed lock and a brass handle. At 47 by 46 cm it is compact and nearly square, closer to hand luggage than to the large wardrobe and steamer trunks for which the house is best known. What sets it apart is inside. Alongside the Louis Vuitton maker's plate is a second label, that of Saks & Co., Fifth Avenue, New York. The object therefore carries two names: the Paris house that built it and the American store that sold it.

Louis Vuitton's American trade began in the 1890s. Georges Vuitton travelled to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, where he met the department-store owner John Wanamaker, and in 1898 Wanamaker became the house's exclusive distributor in the United States, selling in New York and Philadelphia. In the following decades Vuitton trunks also reached other American stores, and examples carrying a Saks label, such as this one, survive. Saks Fifth Avenue opened in September 1924 at 611 Fifth Avenue, a joint venture between Horace Saks of Saks & Company and his cousin Bernard Gimbel. Under Adam Gimbel, president from 1926, it grew to ten stores by the end of the 1930s, including resort branches in Palm Beach and Southampton. Its Salon Moderne helped introduce Schiaparelli, Vionnet, Mainbocher and Balenciaga to American customers. A Vuitton trunk sold on Fifth Avenue belongs to the same system: Paris supplied the names, and New York stores selected, labelled and sold them.

Vuitton trunks were designed around the vehicles of their time. The house describes its cabin trunk as made to slide under the beds of ocean-liner cabins, and in the 1930s it added softer bags, among them the Noé of 1932, for travel that was becoming faster and lighter. After Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in 1927, he was given a piece of Vuitton luggage for the journey home. The route between Paris and New York was also a route for fashion: Sophie Gimbel, who ran the Saks Salon Moderne, travelled to Paris to buy from the couture houses. That exchange was interrupted when German forces occupied Paris in June 1940. New York turned to its own designers, and Vogue's first issue dedicated to American fashion, in 1940, carried Gimbel's work on its cover. Depending on its precise date, this trunk belongs either to the last years of regular transatlantic exchange or to the years in which it was suspended.

The trunk identifies itself in two different ways. On the outside, the identity is in the surface: Georges Vuitton devised the Monogram pattern in 1896 in response to counterfeiters, so that the canvas itself, rather than an applied label, would carry the name. Inside, the identification is documentary. The maker's plate records the house; the Saks label records the point of sale, and with it the store's own standing with its customer. The object therefore records not only who made it but where it was bought. The construction speaks of handling: brass corners and leather trim protect the edges, the latches and keyed lock secure the lid, and a single brass handle allows it to be lifted by one person. The nearly square format, unlike the long, low cabin trunk, suggests a piece meant to stay close to its owner in a cabin or compartment rather than travel in the baggage hold.

The interest of this trunk lies in what it documents. It belongs to the family era of Louis Vuitton, decades before the house became part of a larger group, and to the period when the Monogram was still above all a travel canvas: the house adapted it for supple bags only at the end of the 1950s. Its Saks label connects it to the American distribution of French luxury, a history more often told through clothes than through luggage. Retailer labels are among the details that dealers and auction houses single out on early Vuitton trunks; in 2022 a trunk bearing both Vuitton and John Wanamaker labels sold at Freeman's for more than twice its upper estimate. Completeness matters to that reading. Here both the maker's plate and the retailer label survive, and the trunk is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity from an Italian auction house.