In a plaza near the brand-new Louis Vuitton store on Zhongshan North Road, couples gather to take pictures of themselves and a super-sized piece of LV luggage. There are even two security guards to stop them clambering over the giant trunk, with it's distinctive LV monogram pattern and brass locks.
Opposite stands a white Italian marble monument to taste, the latest LV flagship store. The stones have been laser monogrammed with square holes and are backlit by an ethereal orange glow at night. A smartly suited gentleman opens the door and you are swept into another world.
Designed by the office of Japanese architect Inui Kumiko, the overall impression is of opaque surfaces bearing the fashion company's signature "damier" pattern; teak and stainless steel. The carpets are deep and lush. There are large mirrors that show looped videos of LV collections.
PHOTOS COURTESY OF LOUIS VUITOON
A mixture of the well-heeled and the curious peruse the store, as if they were in an art gallery. They stop, they ooh and they aah. There are four floors and a red embroidered leather elevator to take you up and down. But most people take the tour up the stairs, all the way to the bookshop at the top.
It's only the second LV bookstore in the world, with glossy tomes like African Wisdom 365 Days by Danielle and Olivier Follmi, which features the apposite advice from Birago Diop, "Listen more often/To things than to beings."
And some of the items on display do have a lot to say for themselves. Seventy percent of LV sales are bags and these range in price from NT$20,000 to NT$40,000. Diamond encrusted gold pendants are big sellers; and the 12 Skyline 101 watches going for NT$2 million have all been snapped up. There's also menswear, glasses, women's fashion and accessories.
There are no price tags for the items in the store. As the saying goes, "If you have to ask, then you probably can't afford it." Many of LV's customers are asking for made-to-order or special order goods which cost even more, says LV communications manager Ben Huang (
The luxury goods market is paradoxical. Buying into a lifestyle means paying a premium so that other people know you've got money. The nouveau riche are most likely to announce their rise by appropriating symbols of wealth.
Yet, money seems to be a dirty word. Curiously for a company that reportedly opened 23 stores and increased net profits by 50 percent last year, discussion of money seems to be taboo.
"We don't talk about money because that's not what a luxury goods manufacturer does," says Huang, who brushes aside questions about how much the store cost.
He then squashes reports that last week's fabulous opening ceremony featuring the South Korean star Rain and the after party at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall cost US$1.5 million. He does admit, however, the cast of A-list celebrities and their acolytes quaffed 2,700 bottles of champagne.
You can tell that Huang is a practiced hand at fending off questions about fake LV items as he is adept at reiterating the company line that it cooperates with the police and government to reduce piracy.
"It's not the company's responsibility to tell people whether or not an item is fake. A lot of people ask, `How you can tell?' We say, come to the store, then it can be guaranteed."
As for the argument that fake goods fuel a "need" for the real thing, he says that since counterfeiters operate illegally, the market does not officially exist so he cannot comment on it. "I can only talk about LV in Taiwan."
"We did not build this maison just for profit. This is more about art and lifestyle and providing something special here," Huang said. "It's about inspiration and the lessons learned from 150 years of experience [since the founding of Louis Vuitton]. Our products are in museums. ... Maybe we are not the first in the market with some goods, but we do want to be the best."
Looking around the store he has a point.
Louis Vuitton Maison is at 47, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 2, Taipei (台北市中山北路二段47號).
US President Donald Trump may have hoped for an impromptu talk with his old friend Kim Jong-un during a recent trip to Asia, but analysts say the increasingly emboldened North Korean despot had few good reasons to join the photo-op. Trump sent repeated overtures to Kim during his barnstorming tour of Asia, saying he was “100 percent” open to a meeting and even bucking decades of US policy by conceding that North Korea was “sort of a nuclear power.” But Pyongyang kept mum on the invitation, instead firing off missiles and sending its foreign minister to Russia and Belarus, with whom it
When Taiwan was battered by storms this summer, the only crumb of comfort I could take was knowing that some advice I’d drafted several weeks earlier had been correct. Regarding the Southern Cross-Island Highway (南橫公路), a spectacular high-elevation route connecting Taiwan’s southwest with the country’s southeast, I’d written: “The precarious existence of this road cannot be overstated; those hoping to drive or ride all the way across should have a backup plan.” As this article was going to press, the middle section of the highway, between Meishankou (梅山口) in Kaohsiung and Siangyang (向陽) in Taitung County, was still closed to outsiders
Many people noticed the flood of pro-China propaganda across a number of venues in recent weeks that looks like a coordinated assault on US Taiwan policy. It does look like an effort intended to influence the US before the meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping (習近平) over the weekend. Jennifer Kavanagh’s piece in the New York Times in September appears to be the opening strike of the current campaign. She followed up last week in the Lowy Interpreter, blaming the US for causing the PRC to escalate in the Philippines and Taiwan, saying that as
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has a dystopian, radical and dangerous conception of itself. Few are aware of this very fundamental difference between how they view power and how the rest of the world does. Even those of us who have lived in China sometimes fall back into the trap of viewing it through the lens of the power relationships common throughout the rest of the world, instead of understanding the CCP as it conceives of itself. Broadly speaking, the concepts of the people, race, culture, civilization, nation, government and religion are separate, though often overlapping and intertwined. A government
RSS