A Classic Valise Gets a Silvery Sheen

When Louis Vuitton, a malletier who got his start as a professional packer for the wife of Napoleon III, founded his namesake Paris-based firm in the mid-19th century, travel was cumbersome, time-consuming and rare. The heavily reinforced trunks he fashioned had to be big enough to hold months’ worth of belongings and to endure long sea voyages and arduous train trips. But in the years between the world wars, as automobile and commercial air travel proliferated, life on the road became easier and more streamlined, as did the luggage the house produced. During the 1930s, the company began making a trio of boxy poplar-wood-frame suitcases in graduated sizes — the Alzer, the Bisten and the Corté, the last of which has been known since the late 1960s as the Cotteville — covered in the brand’s monogrammed canvas. The smallest of Louis Vuitton’s hard-sided porte-habits (at only 16 inches wide), the Cotteville, which, like the larger cases, is adorned with the signature S lock, leather trim and brass fittings, has always been synonymous with on-the-fly luxury. This season, Virgil Abloh, the artistic director of the brand’s men’s wear line, has designed the Cotteville 40 in the house’s Mirror Monogram canvas with silvery metal trim and a contrasting pale leather handle. Reflective of a collective craving for travel, the compact suitcase seems perfect for its era: shiny and hopeful, with a nod to the past.