The Louis Vuitton Suitcase Bruno Aveillan Kept Packing
LE MILE
When Bruno Aveillan writes about his Louis Vuitton Alzer 75, he mentions “the silence of a bedroom before sleep”. He has been packing the same suitcase for more than thirteen years, and on his travels he made a habit of taking its picture. The case turns up in the ruins of an abandoned village in Argentina and in Iceland’s volcanic terrain. Somewhere along the way, a raccoon made it into the book. There are 350 photographs in The Suitcase, made across more than a hundred destinations.
©Bruno Aveillan
Behind The Scenes
Before the Alzer became his subject, Aveillan had already put Vuitton’s idea of travel on screen, directing the house’s first television and cinema campaign in 2008. “Where will life take you?” asked the film. The book grew out of a job he gave himself while travelling to make other people’s films. Since the Alzer was already packed for each trip, he had a subject he could come back to on assignments that otherwise had little to do with one another. Aveillan calls the series an indirect self-portrait and has grouped the photographs by theme, with chapters including Refuges and Silences. The Alzer sometimes takes up a good part of the frame. In other pictures, looking for it makes you stay with a place you might have glanced at before turning the page. You can follow Aveillan by the suitcase, even when the order of his journeys is left open. The clothes inside are anybody’s guess.
Louis Vuitton is showing the photographs for the 130th anniversary of its Monogram canvas. The Alzer dates to the 1960s and has its origins in the garment cases the house developed in the 1890s. The one in these photographs still belongs to a working traveller, who could set it down long enough to take a picture and pick it up again for the next leg of his trip.
Flammarion and Éditions Noir publish The Suitcase on 11 November 2026. The exhibition La Valise Bruno Aveillan opens two days later at LV Dream, 26 Quai de la Mégisserie in central Paris, alongside Paris Photo.
©Bruno Aveillan
Louis Vuitton The Suitcase
photographs by Bruno Aveillan
Portrait of Bruno Aveillan
header image credit:
©Bruno Aveillan, from Louis Vuitton The Suitcase