Copyright © Françoise Herrmann
During his brief tenure as Creative Director for menswear at the 170-year-old Louis Vuitton (LV) luxury fashion House, Virgil Abloh* had time to introduce skate-style sneakers into the prestigious line of LV shoes. The chunky sneaker, street-skate style, was re-created and expertly tweaked into an iconic LV sneaker. A sneaker that became a permanent staple of the luxury LV product line. Luxury, because each pair of LV sneakers is hand-crafted at the Manufacture de Souliers Louis Vuitton (manufacturing and design center for LV shoes), in Fiesso d'Artico, close to Venice, Italy. A shoe manufacturing process that takes approximately seven hours to complete for each pair.
Skate-style, as in “skateboard-style”, the board that was originally designed, in the 50s and 60s, for surfers to keep fit and agile on land, during periods when there are no waves to ride in the ocean. A twenty-first-century style that had already transitioned over several decades, from the niche-sport surf-style into a global street-style phenomenon, complete with organized skate competitions, skate music, skate fashion, and insider skate talk (Thimo, 2024). A style that Virgil Abloh had already pioneered in the United States with his own luxury streetwear brand called Off-White™.
The LV street-style sneakers have a patented sole. The US design patent, USD1033004, titled Sole for footwear, was awarded on July 2nd, 2024, to Mathias Patillon and Alexander Kelvy. The patent was then assigned to the original legendary (1854) trunk-making company Louis Vuitton Malletier (FR).
Below, the patent Figure depicting the patented sole design, from the bottom-up, together with LV Skate and LV Trainer sneakers models, both manufactured with the patented sole design.
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