\n<\/p>\n
While preparing for their long-awaited One More Haim Tour for their album Women in Music Pt. III<\/em> and in the market for an outfit\u2014\u201cnormally on our tours we would just wear what was in our suitcases, but with this one we really wanted a uniform,\u201d Alana says\u2014they fell in love with a pair of black leather pants from Vuitton\u2019s fall-winter 2022 women\u2019s collection, buttery and buckled with a high-waist silhouette. \u201cThere\u2019s nothing short of high kicks happening onstage,\u201d says Este. \u201cAnd I think the big question was, can we do these high kicks in these leather pants? And the answer is yes.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe actually found out later that we are the only ones that have the pants,\u201d Alana says. After the runway sample, Louis Vuitton produced only three pairs to the sisters\u2019 measurements. They topped them with black bralettes (also by Vuitton) and performed, they say, more than 60 shows in them, from Las Vegas to London\u2014where they were joined by their good pal Taylor Swift, plunderer of past lives and layer of Easter eggs, for a mash-up of their song \u201cGasoline\u201d with her \u201cLove Story.\u201d She, too, donned the leather pants. \u201cWe have the three, and there\u2019s one in existence that she wore,\u201d Alana says. The sisters still own their pairs. The fourth is back in the Vuitton archive.<\/p>\n All major fashion houses<\/strong> catalog their pasts, amassing a repository of brand codes and bygone collections. But for Vuitton, historically a trunk maker that only expanded into fashion in 1997, the archive is of particular relevance\u2014it is a fashion brand that emerged from the beautiful rubble of its history.<\/p>\n In the mid 1830s it took the teenage Louis Vuitton two years and nearly 300 miles on foot to travel from his childhood home in Anchay, France, to Paris; there he apprenticed with a master box maker, began working for the empress, and in 1854 created the company that would bear his name for many years to come. The brand\u2019s rise coincided with that of the 20th-century travel boom. \u201cPeople wanted to discover the world to learn from the other, from the outside country, from the foreigners,\u201d the archivist Samuel says. \u201cSo they began to think about great expeditions.\u201d Vuitton created luggage to accompany these travels, but the family were self-mythologizers and collectors too. Louis\u2019s son Georges created the iconic linked LV monogram, and his<\/em> son, Gaston-Louis, gravitated toward antique trunks and objets related to travel.<\/p>\n Many fashion houses began to seriously consider the preservation of their archives in the 1980s, when the rise of fast fashion and industrialized techniques created a looming fear of loss. \u201cIt was at this moment that everybody has discovered that the know-how, the savoir faire, is important to preserve because it has begun to disappear,\u201d Samuel says. With Gaston-Louis, the Vuitton archive had a significant head start. And already, the past had long served as inspiration. In the 1900s Louis Vuitton began to produce flaconniers, small cases with structured compartments designed to hold perfume bottles\u2014in the 1920s the house released its first scents. \u201cThe first idea was to pack perfume,\u201d says Samuel, \u201cand then we made perfume.\u201d<\/p>\n In this year\u2019s fall-winter collection, marking 10 years designing for the brand, Ghesqui\u00e8re unleashed a whirlwind of the time-warped and revisited, not only riffing on motifs from his own past collections but actually printing images of historic trunks\u2014including a 1924 automobile trunk used by Citro\u00ebn\u2014onto silk and cotton to create sculptural trompe l\u2019oeil dresses, and on the modern silhouettes of new handbags. In his very first Vuitton collection, Ghesqui\u00e8re shrunk archival trunks, including a custom one made for the 19th-century banker and philanthropist Albert Kahn, into adorably tiny boxy purses: the iconic Petite Malle that remains one of Vuitton\u2019s best-known bags.<\/p>\n