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Africa, by craftsmen in the big lumber shop on the ground floor. For the hinge, Vuitton craftsmen glue a piece of sturdy canvas to the inside, and another on the outside. Louis Vuitton invented this method in 1854 to replace the bulky metal brackets of the period. The canvas hinge doesn’t break, opens and closes easily, and creates a flat surface on the back of the trunk. The trunk’s exterior material—usually Vuitton’s waterproofed monogram or Damier check canvas—is glued onto the wood box and hinge. The corner covers are made of brass or of leather shaped by hot and cold pressure in a mold. The edge trim, known as lozine, is made of many layers of paper and cloth pressed together and dipped in a zinc solution. Upstairs, workers nail on the poplar belts around the middle, the lozine trim on the edges, the corner covers, and the hardware. The banging is so loud that most of the eight workers in the “hammering department” wear earplugs. The lining, made of a pearl gray cotton canvas called Vuittonitte, or a synthetic suede called Alcantara, is glued inside; khaki woven cotton straps that read “Louis Vuitton” are attached to hold items in place. The trunk is then cleaned up, inspected, and sent off to be packaged and shipped.
    Thousands of handbags are made at the Asnières compound each year as well. The steamer bag—originally designed in 1901 as a laundry sack for steamship travel and today one of the Vuitton’s most popular items—is made by hand. Steamer bags, handbags made of exotic leathers such as crocodile and ostrich, and special-order items are all made by one artisan rather than on the assembly line. Vuitton gets about 450 to 500 special orders each year. Some are simply new editions of an existing model, like the trunk bed first designed for French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza in 1868 for his African travels through the Congo; others are a reworking of something that already exists, like a jewelry box covered in an exotic skin instead of the monogram toile, or something designed to the customer’s specs. When I was in Asnières, one artisan was finishing up a tennis bag in Damier canvas that holds two rackets; it took two weeks to produce and would be the only one in the world.
    The rest of Vuitton’s production is assembly-line work, most of it done on machines. In a big sunlit room on the second floor, a dozen seamstresses were running up hundreds of LV monogram denim Pleaty handbags on their machines. These bags would sell for $ 1,150 apiece and be so popular they’d be back-ordered within weeks. “High profitability comes…in the atelier—the factory,” Bernard Arnault once explained. “Production is organized in such a way that we have unbelievably high productivity. The atelier is a place of amazing discipline and rigor. Every single motion, every step of every process, is carefully planned with the most modern and complete engineering technology. It’s not unlike how cars are made in the most modern factories. We analyze how to make each part of the product, where to buy each component, where to find the best leather at the best price, what treatment it should receive. A single purse can have up to 1 , 000 manufacturing tasks, and we plan each and every one.”
    Today, there are three Vuitton family members employed by the Louis Vuitton company: Patrick-Louis, a fifth-generation descendent of the founder, who oversees special orders and serves as a house ambassador; his youngest son, Benoit-Louis, born in 1977 , who is watch special orders manager at the headquarters in Paris; and Pierre-Louis, his oldest son, who works as a craftsman in Asnières. I ran into Pierre-Louis as I visited the workshop in the spring of 2006 . Pierre’s a kind-looking fellow, rather pale, with hazel eyes, closely clipped dark hair, and protruding ears. He was dressed in a white lab coat over a checked shirt and jeans. On the pocket of his coat was an LV logo embroidered in brown thread. He was