Louis-Vuitton

Jonathan Anderson opened his Dior on 2 January 2026 with a Book Tote embroidered as a 1955 first edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula — and that Book Tote, retailing at $3,550, is the most expensive single position in a market that the world’s twenty largest fashion houses are now actively publishing books to claim. The trigger for the dossier is Business of Fashion’s 1 June 2026 piece “How Books Became Fashion’s Favourite Flex”, which read Coach’s March 2026 ‘Explore Your Story’ campaign with Elle Fanning and the Dior Book Cover Collection as the same gesture. They are. They are also the smallest, most visible tip of a register that has been building since at least 1973, when Hermès printed the first German-language Die Welt von Hermès. This piece is an atlas of seventeen-plus programmes by the fashion houses publishing books in 2026, organised by what each programme is for. ...

Of the eight luxury houses with a dedicated publishing imprint in 2026, only one — Louis Vuitton — has run one continuously for more than two decades, starting with a seven-volume City Guides boxed set in a handmade leather sleeve in 1998. Every other operation on the map below — Hermès Éditeur, Chanel via Steidl, Dior via Assouline and Rizzoli, Prada, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent Rive Droite, Miu Miu, Burberry and now Coach — is younger, in most cases by fifteen years or more. The story of luxury publishing imprints in 2026 is how an industry that spent the 2010s collapsing into Instagram squares spent the 2020s rebuilding itself around printed objects: monographs, magazines, literary salons, micro-books on bag charms. ...

Objets Nomades is the longest-running argument in fashion-into-design, and at fourteen years it has become the argument other houses are now answering. Since 2012, Louis Vuitton has invited architects and designers to make functional objects shaped by the house’s travel heritage — trunks, straps, hardware, the choreography of packing and unpacking — and shown them every April inside Palazzo Serbelloni, the eighteenth-century neoclassical pile on Corso Venezia 16. The 2026 edition does what every mature edition of Objets Nomades now does: it adds three serious new commissions, restages older pieces against the palazzo’s frescoed rooms, and quietly raises the bar for what a fashion house’s furniture programme is allowed to be. After this year’s Milan Design Week, it is no longer credible to file Objets Nomades alongside the licensed-extension category. It belongs with the design programmes that publishers like Cassina and Vitra have spent decades building — and it is starting to behave like one. ...