Louis Vuitton has always had one of the more comprehensive websites of the major handbag brands – it’s always had e-commerce, and even for pieces not sold online, prices and color options were generally available for shopper’ perusal – but it’s never been one of the more functional of fashion’s branded sites. Thanks to Nicolas Ghesquiere and his new vision for the brand, all that has changed. Please say the appropriate thank-yous to the deity of your choice.
If anyone on Earth hated Louis Vuitton’s old website more than I did, it was probably some poor Vuitton employee that was required to use it every day; I simply visited once or twice a week, and rarely did I not find something that was buggy or broken. It was slow, non-intuitive and cumbersome to load even on my super-speedy and up-to-date work computer, but much have that has been fixed.
Ghesquiere has done quite a bit to refocus the Vuitton aesthetic in his time at the brand, and much of that has been by way of simplification. LV will never be minimalist, but Ghesquiere’s always had a knack for stripping away unnecessary things, and you can see that in not only his designs, but also the ad campaign and now the website that have come along to represent them.
The new site has largely the same features as the previous one, but without as much bulky, slow-loading, buggy Flash animation. Bag photos are big and clear, with white backgrounds instead of the previous colors, and switching between colorways and sizes in a single bag takes far less loading time.
Best of all, the motion sickness-inducing carousel for browsing bags in a particular category is gone; instead, shoppers can simply scroll up and down through thumbnail listings, as basically every other retail site allows us to do. For Vuitton, whose online experience has been so bad, for so long, it feels practically revolutionary.
Check out some stills of the site below or test it out for yourself at LouisVuitton.com.
