Travel, speed and internationality. With a plus: a crossing of LV, a flowery but balanced monogram, which avoids forgery while instilling itself, at the same time, in the collective imagination. At the Express registry office, the Louis Vuitton Speedy bagwas born in 1924 from an intuition of George, son of the founder, who sees in the trunk in cotton canvas with rubber coating, a way to satisfy the demanding clientele who had made the fortune of their father’s poplar suitcases. A deluxe traveller – from the intellectual in need of a desk always at hand, to the lady of lineage unable to move without twenty hats in tow – whose desires change with the same speed with which the means change in the 1930s. It is the era of the first commercial flights, as well as cars that invade the Parisian boulevards, driving men and women with a cosmopolitan attitude who need a new fetish – practical and malleable – for weekends away. The Keepall, XL bag invented only six years earlier, becomes out of scale, not suitable for the age of mobility that outlines a fast and potentially borderless future. The Speedy maintains the elegance of the maison’s older sisters unchanged, but smooths out the silhouette and sharpens the centimeters which become, in the first model conceived, thirty. The monogram, a blatant and glaring expression of contemporary luxury, will soon mark the trunkcovered with a single remnant of tenacious canvas, in order not to succumb to increasingly frequent displacements.
But to see the popularity of the Vuitton accessory flourish, we have to wait the 60s, the decade in which the trunk intertwined its destiny with that of celebrities, the divines of Hollywood cinema who link their existence as globe-trotters to that of the new fashionable symbol of the rampant bourgeoisie. One above all? The graceful one Audrey Hepburn who, in 1965, asked the Louis Vuitton maison to create a smaller version of the bag for her: minus 5 cm to satisfy the need (from the motif never revealed) of the star of Breakfast at Tiffany’s which, in turn, will decline the Speedy 25 from one airport to another, or walking the streets of Paris on the arm of his friend Hubert de Givenchy, elevating the accessory to it-bag, as well as the ultimate object of feminine desire. For the history of the Speedy baghowever, the year of real change was 1997 when a 34-year-old designer arrived at the creative direction of Louis Vuitton who desecrated the classicism of the monogram with collaborations and massive injections of pop art, re-signifying the universe in a contemporary key by Louis Vuitton and its iconic trunk. It is with Marc Jacobs that the history of the it-bag is rewritten, in a fresh, compelling and mocking way, at the center of which is the fascinating connection with the art world that will open the doors of the historic maison to the younger generations as well.
In 2001, the Speedy by Stephen Sprouse – the one with the neon graffiti that today we win (with luck and a full wallet) only on resell sites – distorts the monogram with a respectful and at the same time insolent way and opens up a new universe of Los Angeles starlets including, of course, Kim Kardashian which enrich the concept of it-bag with another meaning, assimilating it, in its limited edition artist version, to a conquered and exhibited style trophy. It is instead of 2003, the union with the Japanese Neopop of Takashi Murakami which carries red cherries and smiling flowers on the Speedy, printing joie de vivre on the usual basis of the highest craftsmanship.
Most recently, in 2012 and then again today, a special collab with the legendary Yayoi Kusama That obliterates the trunk of obsessive colored polka dots giving the history of Louis Vuitton and all of fashion an icon that is once again different. To date the Speedy Bagwhich since 2011 has also become one Bandoulière equipped with a shoulder strap, it is sold in a multitude of different variations and sizes: in addition to the canonical 25, 30 and 35, there is also the Lilliputian Dwarfwhile to the canvas- Damier Azur or It is good– leather has also been added, in the more classic version Monogram or printed with vitamins Infinity Dots à la Kusama. The charm of him? Unchanged, for almost a hundred years now.
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