CELEBRATING THE MONOGRAM, ICON OF ICONS

Louis Vuitton marks 130 years of its signature canvas through five timeless bags and the journeys that made them enduring.

- CHECHE V. MORAL

PIERRE-LOUIS VUITTON Head of Savoir-faire at Louis Vuitton and sixth-generation member of the Vuitton family

Some symbols arrive fully formed. Others take time — absorbing memory, movement, and meaning until they become inseparable from the lives that carry them.

The Louis Vuitton Monogram belongs to the latter. As Louis Vuitton marks 130 years of its most enduring emblem in 2026, the celebration feels less like a commemoration than a meditation on how a signature learned how to live.

Created in 1896 by Georges Vuitton as a tribute to his father, the Monogram did not exist at the birth of the House. “That's one of the things people often forget,” says Pierre-Louis Vuitton, a sixth-generation member of the Vuitton family. “When Louis Vuitton arrived in 1854, the Monogram wasn't there yet. He never actually saw it.”

What defined the House in its earliest years was not ornament but innovation: flat-topped trunks in waterproof Gris Trianon canvas, designed for stacking, durability, and modern travel. The Monogram would come later born not only from necessity, but from memory.

When Georges Vuitton conceived the Monogram four years after his father’s death, he was responding to a world already grappling with imitation. But rather than simply protecting the House’s creations, he chose to express its identity. Interlacing the LV initials with floral motifs inspired by Gothic cathedral ornamentation and the influence of Japonism, Georges designed a pattern that was both decorative and disciplined, expressive yet precise.

“Once Georges developed the Monogram canvas, it eclipsed all the other motifs and became extremely important for the House,” reflects Pierre-Louis, who now heads the House’s Savoir-faire. Protection became philosophy; function became authorship.