Behind the Maison there has always been the man: Monsieur Louis Vuitton, who today would have celebrated his 200th birthday. Having helped changed the face of luxury fashion while establishing Paris as its unofficial capital, the bicentennial will be marked with suitable aplomb, involving a milieu of cultural events taking place over several months.

Louis 200 is the name given to a series of creative initiatives that highlight the continuing legacy of the founder’s original vision. From around the world, a series of mixed-media tributes will reflect the diversity of Vuitton’s life-work as an adventurer, entrepreneur, designer and innovator. Beginning with an interactive video game, players will be able to guide the house’s mascot through a series of fantasy worlds with an opportunity to unlock NFT’s hidden within.

There will also be a number of window displays showcasing the original iconic trunk design that formed the building block of Vuitton’s early business. Beginning today, Louis Vuitton’s store windows across the world will unveil new interpretations of the original trunk from 200 contributors, including Marc Jacobs and house ambassadors, BTS. The initiative continues a long-standing tradition of the trunk as a blank canvas for artists to develop their individual expression. These miniature installations will be followed by a large-scale triptych by US artist Alex Katz and a fiction novel by French writer Caroline Bongrand, chronicling the life of the designer and available in both French and English from October.

The celebration’s denouement arrives with a new documentary on Louis Vuitton, Looking for Louis, that follows his hermetic early life as an orphan in eastern France to his journey to Paris and meteoric rise as a trunk maker within the city’s elite circles that saw him become the personal trunk maker for the Empress of France by the age of 30. The documentary will be broadcast on Apple TV’s Explore channel from December.

Find more info on Louis 200 here.