Luxury goods and team sports usually only interact in one way: star athletes using their considerable wealth to buy cool stuff and flex it on Instagram. With sports that double as leisure activities of the wealthy—golf, tennis and yachting, mostly—luxury brands often dabble in direct sponsorships, but globally popular team sports tend to be reserved for sports-centric, mass-market companies like Nike or Adidas. The World Cup is a tournament unlike any other, though, which means everyone wants a piece of the pie, including Louis Vuitton.
Vuitton has long been involved with FIFA as the maker of the official case for the tournament’s famous trophy, and for the 2018 World Cup, which began Thursday in Russia, the brand has launched a small collection of men’s bags and small leather goods to commemorate the occasion. The pieces are all rendered in Epi leather, and they’re all patchworked to look like soccer balls. But you already knew that, because you can see the photos.
While the collection is technically for men (and the wallets are in the structures generally preferred by men), the backpack and Keepall are travel bags that don’t need to be gendered for any particular reason, and global soccer fandom (as well as interest in luxury leather goods) certainly isn’t limited to men. Like you might expect, most of the pieces are sold out online and must be sourced through your local boutique, but my favorite—and the least expensive—part of the collection still has some availability: the luggage tag, which comes the colors of over a dozen countries, featuring the flag on the tag’s rear side. Check out all the pieces below.