Louis Vuitton × Takashi Murakami Multicolor Pyramid trunk set

Louis Vuitton and Japan: A Long Correspondence in Trunks and Art

The relationship between Louis Vuitton and Japan is older than the stores, older than the Murakami bags and, according to the publisher of the house's own exhibition book, almost as old as the house itself. Chapter four of the Louis Vuitton documentary follows it through the earliest Japanese clients, the first stores of 1978, the Jun Aoki building on Omotesando and three exhibitions in Tokyo and Osaka, and it marks the places where accounts differ.

The earliest Japanese clients

Accounts of the first Japanese customer disagree. The house's timeline names Ōyama Iwao in 1871 as the first recorded Japanese client. A report on the touring exhibition Volez, Voguez, Voyagez dates the first orders from Japanese customers to 1883, when two politicians, Itagaki Taisuke and Gotō Shōjirō, ordered bespoke trunks at the Paris store. The two accounts may describe different things, a first recorded customer and a first recorded order, and we give both. When the exhibition reached Tokyo, a Japan room was added; it held Itagaki's trunk, a tea ceremony trunk and a make-up trunk made for the Kabuki actor Ichikawa Ebizō XI.

Japonisme in the canvas

One account of the Monogram that Georges Vuitton designed in 1896 holds that Japanese family crests influenced the pattern. The publisher of the 2025 book Louis Vuitton and Japan: Visionary Journeys says that the house's engagement with Japanese culture dates almost from its founding and that the Monogram partly drew on Japanese design. Gaston-Louis Vuitton, who took control in 1936, collected Japanese sword guards, or tsuba, and antique trunks, many of them imported from Japan. None of this makes the Monogram a Japanese pattern, but it places the house inside the Japonisme that shaped European taste in the second half of the nineteenth century.

1978: Tokyo and Osaka

The first stores in Japan opened in 1978, in Tokyo and Osaka. One report describes the first Japanese store as the brand's fourth, after Paris, Nice and London. The opening came a year after Henry Racamier's takeover in 1977 and nine years before the formation of LVMH in 1987.

The Omotesando building, 2002

The building on Omotesando, completed in 2002 to a design by Jun Aoki, takes the form of trunks piled at random. Each trunk is a distinct space, joined by a maze of corridors that make movement between them a small journey. The facade is a soft metal fabric meant to evoke the texture of fallen leaves from the zelkova trees in front, with the exterior using metal mesh, polished stainless panels or two layers of patterned glass. The building measures 25.5 metres wide, 20.8 metres deep and 31.9 metres high, with an irregular steel cage structure. On the seventh floor, LV Hall has a triple-height ceiling wrapped in a three-layer screen of metal mesh, glass and white embroidered lace. It is the plainest statement of the idea that a trunk is architecture.

Three exhibitions

  • Volez, Voguez, Voyagez, Tokyo. The exhibition travelled from a nine-week run in Paris to Kioicho in Tokyo, closing on 19 June, and then went on to New York. Olivier Saillard curated 600 trunks, accessories and documents from the archives in ten themed rooms, with set design by Robert Carsen, and the Tokyo showing added a Japan room.
  • Louis Vuitton &, Harajuku. Staged at Jing in Harajuku and open until 16 May 2021, it celebrated more than 160 years of creative exchange in ten immersive spaces, from early twentieth-century special-order trunks and Gaston-Louis Vuitton's window displays to Murakami's Superflat art and the Artycapucines. It named Kansai Yamamoto, Hiroshi Fujiwara, Yayoi Kusama and NIGO among the Japanese figures with whom the house shares an admiration.
  • Visionary Journeys, Osaka. Held at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art from 15 July to 17 September 2025, in conjunction with Expo Osaka Kansai 2025, it celebrated 170 years since the founding of the house. Florence Müller curated it, Shohei Shigematsu of OMA designed the scenography, and it ran across twelve thematic chapters and more than 1,000 objects, of which 200 have a particular resonance with Japan. The Japan section covered collaborations with Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama, Rei Kawakubo and NIGO, and bespoke trunks were made for the house's ambassador Sho Hirano and for the Osaka-born designer Verdy. Rizzoli Electa published a 288-page book of the same name in 2025.

The Japanese names on the house's roll

Beyond the house

Louis Vuitton is only one of the places where Japan met Paris. The wider story, from Hanae Mori in 1965 to Junya Watanabe in 1993, is told in Japan in Paris, and the sportswear partnership of Yohji Yamamoto and adidas is in the Y-3 guide.

Why Japan

A house that has kept faith with Japanese clients since the nineteenth century is also one whose pieces have been kept well in Japan. The result is pre-owned stock of unusual quality: limited editions, ready-to-wear and early canvases, graded by the system explained in Japanese condition ranks. The wider argument is in Why Japan Is the World's Finest Market for Pre-owned Luxury.

In the archive now

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Index terms: louis vuitton japan history · louis vuitton omotesando jun aoki · louis vuitton 1978 tokyo osaka · louis vuitton visionary journeys osaka 2025 · louis vuitton & jing harajuku · volez voguez voyagez tokyo · louis vuitton japonisme monogram · louis vuitton sho hirano · louis vuitton verdy

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