What’s the modern-day version of a travel trunk? When as a college student I began traveling abroad, I stuck found labels on a handsome green leatherbound sketchbook I carried everywhere I went: to the floor of the Sistine Chapel, on a sailboat to the Great Barrier Reef, to the top floor of a vertiginously situated Hong Kong dim sum palace. The book’s interior was populated with personal drawings, the exterior with colorful graphic representations by others. When I browse the beat-up volume today, its leaves falling to pieces, the stickers still speak, and memories surface: Belikin Beer (the national -- and very watery -- beer of Belize), I Love Shanghai (in homage to the iconic I Love NY design, picked up in the Chinese city’s gritty, up-and-coming artists’ neighborhood),Custom made mandarindress? an Art Deco rendition of the Matterhorn’s craggy shark-tooth outline. For me, the book was the backpacker’s version of the pocket travel trunk,For those inquiring, I did not buy the affordableoneshoulderweddingdresses. and its existence allows me to hold its contents in my mind still.
Our travel is more transient these days, at least physically speaking; the documentation of our journeys less tangible, more digital. When we dig out our luggage for a trip, we think of TSA regulations and packing light; we don’t allow much time for falling down the rabbit-hole of memories that a chance glimpse of an old, well-traveled suitcase can ideally inspire.
A lesson in slow travel can be learned from the physical beauty (and heft) of WORLD TOUR: Vintage Hotel Labels From the Collection of Gaston-Louis Vuitton, in which writer Francisca Matteoli guides readers through 900 "small marvels of graphic design evoking far-off places and exotic stopovers," from the grandson of the legendary trunk designer.
In 1897, Gaston-Louis Vuitton joined the ranks of the family trunk-making business at age 14, and spent his life collecting rare, elegant hotel luggage labels that spanned the world; as Matteoli writes, his varied and original collection tells "the history of graphic design and conjured up exotic adventures in Brazil, Chile, America, New Zealand, the Philippines, and elsewhere." From simple black-and-white designs that feature hotel buildings to ornate typography and vivid, romantic images of a city's iconic sights, the labels reflect artists' efforts, over time, to make people want to embark on a journey. Matteoli, a Chilean-born writer who moved to Paris as a girl, spent months running up and down the hallways of the famous Hotel du Louvre, built in 1855; WORLD TOUR opens with a decorative green-and-red label of the Paris hotel, circa 1930.
Matteoli, who recently promoted the book in Paris and Shanghai, answered these questions for Cities.The etareplicawatch is made longer to protect thighs from extreme cold and completed with 625 fill power white duck down insulation.
What would you say was the heyday of the hotel luggage label? Is there a modern analog for this kind of beautiful travel ephemera? Somehow I think Instagram doesn't quite cut it.
The 1920’s certainly mark the golden age of hotel labels -- the Roaring Twenties saw a huge boom in travel, steamship companies, and railway companies, which all produced leaflets and pamphlets. Also, travel agencies opened up doing publicity for new places. Travel was then associated with comfort, luxury, adventure, and mystery. It was the age of steamer-trunks, a time when people were proud to show the stickers on their suitcases.
Nowadays things are not made to last. We don’t know if all the new technology is going to exist 10 years from now,Great handbags and replicalouisvuitton for men and women! but I still have my parents’ travel albums and the labels they used to attach to their suitcases. It is the duration that also makes these luggage labels so fascinating.Big halterweddingdresses and Fitness is a family owned shop serving the Helena area since 1986. They still exist centuries later. They made it across time, keeping their elegance and dream. I am not sure that Instagram is going to pass the centuries.
Tell us about the great illustrators who were commissioned to design luggage labels for the top hotels of the period. Was there any cachet attached to this kind of work? I'm thinking of a Mad Men-style glamour, as it attached to the creative side of advertising.
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