Louis Vuitton reveals the long, highly specialized process behind its wide collection of exotics
Fact: Your Crocodile Skin City Steamer, priced upward of $55,500 (over ₱3 million), is keeping crocodiles alive. The woke, whose mantra is “ethically sourced! ethically sourced!” will disagree, but it’s true. If not for the luxury industry, the habitats of these precious reptiles would have long been turned into parking lots.
Imagine those bio-diverse swamps, marshlands, brackish waters being drained into pasturelands, on which to raise cattle (for bovine leather that the misled might consider more ethically sourced) and, as a result, we lose not only crocodiles, alligators, pythons, and lizards, but also water voles, spoon-billed sandpipers, natterjack toads, and who knows what else?
Fact: The higher the price of your Rose des Vents made of crocodilian skin, the more reason the luxury goods purveyors, the indigenous communities, and the local governments need to protect the habitats from which they are able to harvest these skins—or, in most cases, the eggs, which are then hatched and raised in more controlled environments like farms or ranches.
The higher the value of your crocodile leather Essential Trunk, the more it helps provide the incentives for which the communities guard these crocodile habitats with their lives. It’s not only because the exotic skin business is their bread and butter, from which they get royalties, commissions, protection, benefits like healthcare and development assistance, as well as the opportunity to keep their natural surroundings, ecosystem, and lifestyle intact. Reptiles are by nature renewable resources with zero ecological footprint compared to, say, agriculture or cattle production, which requires climate change-level amounts of fertilizers and herbicides.
At the end of their journey from the wild, whose conservation are driven by key players in world luxury, the exotics end up turning into functional pieces of art or artful pieces of practical objects.
At Louis Vuitton, where they are responsibly sourced, based on the rules and regulations set by CITES, the convention on the international trade in species of fauna and wild flora threatened with extinction, all crocodile leather, 100 percent, used to manufacture the bags come from farms around the world, such as southern Africa, the US, and Australia, which are certified according to the Crocodilian Standard, a living document based on existing scientific knowledge of crocodilian welfare and farming practices. This certification, initiated by the LVMH Group in partnership with an independent organization, involves the entire industry in the preservation of the species, the protection of the local communities and the environment, and the care for the wellbeing of the animals at every stage of their life and of the men and women on the farms.
No wonder crocodilian skins are so prized at Louis Vuitton that, in its hands, they are only handled with craftsmanship worthy of the masters of art. Creating a bag out of these high-value skins requires not only long, painstaking processes, but also highly specialized care and attention at every stage of production, where every detail, from tanning, buffing, and handswabbing to cutting, stitching, and finishing, is perfected using only the finest, highest quality materials as well as techniques imbued with the 168-year-old French house’s savoir-faire. The handle of a Capucines bag, to illustrate the point, demands no less than four hours of arduous work.
Selection of the skins alone, which begins as soon as the skins are tanned, is a process so assiduous it determines the destiny of each skin chosen for being the crème de la crème of any batch. Often, the natural pattern of scales dictates the most suitable design, color, or finish. Not only do the next stages of development in the hands of designers, craftsmen, and artisans bring out the beauty of the skin, they also see to it that through colors, treatments, and innovations it is given the new form it most deserves.
Although exotic skins are beautiful enough in their natural finishes, which are offered in some of the finished products, Louis Vuitton also experiments with and develops new ways to evolve exotic skin according to contemporary tastes. As a result, the French house boasts of unique, radical, and innovative bespoke finishes, like fusion, the brushing in of lines of color to create a subtle lateral striped effect on the skins, an effect that has become a brand signature, or the latest “rainbow” finish, the result of a detailed and multi-step work in which the expert first gently swabs different colors by hand, one by one, with a stencil, on a white base, followed by a spray of gold all over the skin.
It takes 350 different steps to create a Louis Vuitton exotic skin bag, from the selection of the skin to its final form. Before the creatives comes in to craft the bag, the crocodilian skin has to undergo tanning for up to eight weeks, depending on its nature and size, and then it takes six more weeks to color, deepen, and buff its surface.
The higher the value of your crocodile leather Essential Trunk, the more it helps provide the incentives for which the communities guard these crocodile habitats with their lives.
There are more intricate processes involved. For instance, the development of color recipes to accomplish very specific tones and depths takes 15 adjustments on average. To create a glazed finish, agate, a semi-precious stone beloved by ancient Greek warriors, is used to handbuff each skin, but the stone needs to be polished every two days to keep its surface smooth enough to do the job.
So yes, your now iconic Petite Malle or Dauphine Mini helps keep crocodiles alive and its creation is no less rigorous than the creation of a masterpiece. What you sling around your shoulder, carry in the crook of your elbow, or clasp in your hand is worth its weight in exotic skin.
Louis Vuitton exotic bags are available in a permanent palette of 25 shiny colors and four matte colors, with further options available seasonally. In the Philippines, Louis Vuitton is located at Greenbelt 3, and The Shoppes at Solaire Resort and Casino.