This volume is an unprecedented history of Louis Vuitton's women's bags, the most coveted line of accessories in women's fashion. At the heart of Louis Vuitton are its City Bags, a range of women's bags that dates back to the turn of the twentieth century. Featuring the trademark monograms of the house, the City Bag story began with the Steamer, a resort bag designed in 1901 to be packed inside a much larger steamer trunk. These bags have in a hundred years formally diversified into a dizzying array of handbags for every conceivable function demanded by the modern woman. Profoundly influential, City Bags are now known to millions by their descriptive names (Keepall, Bucket, Papillon, Alma, Locket, Noe, Speedy) and are still evolving into more fantastical forms. Lavishly illustrated with new and archival photography, historical graphics, landmark editorials, and ad campaigns, the volume traces the history of these specific bag families, and examines the earliest specimens and today's most sought-after collectibles, including Vuitton's collaborations with Takashi Murakami, Stephen Sprouse, Richard Prince, Yayoi Kusama, and Rei Kawakubo and one-off projects by Zaha Hadid, Shigeru Ban, Vivienne Westwood, Helmut Lang, Andree Putman, and of course, Marc Jacobs. Louis Vuitton: City Bags is an ambitious volume on the creation and cultivation of a cultural phenomenon.

The more than eighty collaborators featured in this book comprise an A to Z of Vuitton s creative collaborations, especially from the last decade, with significant chapters devoted to the work of Nicolas Ghesquiere, Marc Jacobs, Takashi Murakami and other key collaborators. Never forgetting the long tradition of the house, the period covered by the book from the late 1990s through the present day will describe the role that Louis Vuitton is playing in a crucial moment in global fashion. Now with 536 pages, this edition features more than 130 pages of stunning new imagery that showcases the increasingly symbiotic relationship between fashion, art, and design.