Louis Vuitton brings the Albert Kahn collection to India as a mark of its growth and commitment to the country
Even on a Sunday morning, Yves Carcelle is in good humour. The chairman and CEO of Louis Vuitton has reason to smile. The fifth LV store in India becomes operational at Taj Land’s End in Mumbai in December, it’s opened its first store in Mongolia, there have been grand openings in Macau and Las Vegas, and business has been good. “We’ve survived the crisis well,” he beams over a cup of Darjeeling’s finest, “with double digit growth in the first nine months of the year.”
It is, I goad him, a little unbelievable that people should spend on luxury at a time of such enormous economic meltdown. “In bad times,” he is convinced, “people go back to real value, which is something we have never compromised on.” Which also means that LV has never gone on discount (alas!), but it offers something incomparable in return: the promise of repairs even a hundred years after it has been sold. “People appreciate that quality of service,” he says.
Carcelle, though, isn't in India to promote products but, more interestingly, to introduce to India the Albert Kahn collection of India photographs. Kahn was a rich businessman who, at the turn of the last century, sent out photographers to exotic places around the world to bring back to Europe pictures of those places and their people. India, naturally, was on top of that list.
Kahn, unfortunately, had to file for bankruptcy, and his estate was sold to the city to be converted into a museum, where Carcelle saw the photographs and decided they should travel to India. “When he sent photographers to India” — these included Stephane Passet in 1913-14 and Roger Dumas in 1927-28 — “the trunks for the photographic equipment were customised by Louis Vuitton”, down to the three crosses painted on each trunk as his signature imprint.
The exhibition opened at the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi, and will be seen in Mumbai, at NGMA, in January, but the success already has Carcelle hoping to send it on to Bangalore and Hyderabad before it returns to France. This “link between two cultures”, as Carcelle explains, is not a recent accident — even while Kahn’s photographers were taking pictures of India and Indians, Louis Vuitton was supplying its range of products to the maharajas of Puddukottai, Kashmir and Kapurthala.
Like most luxury labels, Louis Vuitton may have grown less fast than it might have anticipated, but its footprint is both well-respected as well as firmly entrenched. “It is a problem of lack of retail spaces,” explains Carcelle, “we need the hardware,” currently limited to luxury malls DLF Emporio in Delhi and UB City in Bangalore. Nor do the high duties help. But, “We’re not in a hurry,” he says, “we’re growing at 25 per cent per year in this country.” The first Mumbai store, at the Taj Mahal Hotel, which had survived the terrorist attack on it last year, opened earlier in 2009 “rebuilt even more beautifully”. And though he won’t disclose it, Carcelle says “something big” is brewing for India that, he promises, we’ll “learn about soon”. We can hardly wait.