Who was it, exactly, that presided at the wedding of architecture and fashion? Miuccia Prada, possibly. There has been a palpable uptick in the number of major designer-architect collaborations since the Italian fashion maven opened her Rem Koolhaas–designed SoHo shop in 2003, kicking off a fruitful relationship between her label and the Dutch dynamo. More recently, Chanel has been seen in the company of Zaha Hadid and Peter Marino, Massimiliano Fuksas has been squiring Armani, and Prada has had other pairings with the likes of Herzog & de Meuron.

No less enthusiastically, French house Louis Vuitton has turned to big-name architects for help in its efforts to dramatically expand operations worldwide in the last decade. The story of Vuitton’s love affair with architecture—recounted in Rizzoli’s just-released Louis Vuitton: Architecture and Interiors—actually begins before the watershed Rem-Prada moment, with the 1995 selection of Pritzker Prize–winner Christian de Portzamparc as architect for the New York headquarters of Vuitton parent company LVMH. Speaking in an interview with French critic Frédéric Edelmann, one of the book’s primary authors, Potzamparc explains that “Louis Vuitton was the motor” in that project’s development. Since then, the 157-year-old company’s architecture department has brought on such contemporary talents as Kengo Kuma and Jun Aoki to build a string of architecturally distinguished locations around the globe.

The interior of Aoki's Vuitton store in Omotesando

As the book bears out, though, Vuitton’s edifice complex isn’t prompted merely by an effort to keep pace with its peers in the fashion industry. To a greater extent than others, Vuitton came to group all its branding operations (animation, graphics, etc.) under one roof. Says contributor and Rizzoli editor Ian Luna: “They internalized that know-how and created divisions for it.” This insistence on the cogency of its trademark is intrinsic to Vuitton. The same thinking that led to “LV” being stamped all over their valises in the 1870s forms the impetus behind an in-house architecture team, bigger and more active than those of its competitors, that allows Vuitton do a greater volume of design work itself. This has led to a string of truly signature projects—trademarks in architectural form—that have undoubtedly helped the brand create, as Harvard GSD dean Moshen Mostafavi writes in his foreward, “desire on a scale approaching a new mass hysteria.”

Louis Vuitton: Architecture and Interiors from Rizzoli
Photos: Courtesy of Rizzoli

The interior of Peter Marino's Vuitton store in London

A Louis Vuitton building in Ginza, Tokyo by the architect Jun Aoki