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Today it may be one of the biggest and most profitable luxury brands on the planet, a byword for indulgence from Beijing to Bond Street, but Louis Vuitton's origins are more humble, dating back to a young man who left home to make his living packing luggage for the great and the good in 19th-century Paris.

Louis Vuitton himself was born the son of a miller in 1821 in Anchay, a hamlet in the Jura Mountains, not far from the Swiss border. The region was a poor one - serfdom had only been abolished less than 40 years previously, so Louis left to seek his fortune when he was a teenager, arriving in the French capital aged 16. This was the Paris of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, with nearly one million inhabitants. As the composer Chopin said in a letter to a friend at the time, "Here you find the greatest luxury and the greatest filth, the greatest virtue and the greatest vice."

The teenager was taken on as an apprentice by Monsieur Maréchal, a box maker and packer on the Rue Saint-Honoré, then, as now, one of the main thoroughfares of fashionable Paris (today the achingly stylish store Colette sits on the site). Vuitton was to work there for 17 years. By the time he left the service of Maréchal, Charles-Louis Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, had seized power and had proclaimed himself Emperor Napoleon III. Paris was on the verge of becoming the global epicentre for taste and luxury and the city was a whirl of parties. The Emperor had employed Baron Haussmann to redesign the heart of the capital and create the city we can see today. It was also the era of the enormous crinoline hooped skirt. These huge constructions were difficult to transport, so not surprisingly the services of professional packers were in great demand  Replica handbags uk.

In 1854, Vuitton married the 17-year-old Clémence-Emilie Parriaux and decided to open his own company on the Rue des Capucines, just around the corner from his old boss. He advertised his services on a small poster that read, "Securely packs the most fragile objects. Specialising in packing fashions." He also decided to offer his clients trunks that he made himself in a workshop beside the recently opened Gare Saint-Lazare. His success was immediate. He became well known for his innovations, such as using canvas and glue for the casing rather than hide, which could impregnate the contents of the trunk with its smell. He also offered luggage in fashionable colours - in particular a pale shade he called Trianon grey  replica Louis Vuiton bags  .

But the big leap forward came in 1858 when he introduced the slat trunk, which was reinforced with beech slats and covered in Trianon grey canvas. This is arguably the first ever piece of modern luggage and is a design that is still used today. It was the dawn of the age of global travel and to keep up with booming demand, Vuitton moved his workshop to the village of Asnières on the banks of the Seine, three miles from central Paris, where the company's luggage is still made. The factory also became the Vuitton family home, when Louis Vuitton built two villas in the grounds - one for himself and one for his son Georges, who took over the company on his father's death in 1892 and started the family business on its path of global expansion.

Georges had been sent to school in Jersey to learn English and had already opened the company's first overseas store in London, at 289 Oxford Street. Unfortunately, the years have not been as kind to central London as they have to Paris, and while Louis Vuitton's first place of work is now one of the world's hippest stores, the original London space is a branch of the Garfunkel's restaurant chain. Sales in the Oxford Street store were disappointing, so a few years later a new store opened on New Bond Street, opposite where the Maison Louis Vuitton can be found today.

From here, the company went on to conquerthe world. In 1889, the company presented a new canvas at the Exposition Universelle in Paris - where the Eiffel Tower was unveiled. The success of previous canvases, such as the Trianon grey, had led to an explosion of counterfeits so this new design included a discreet registered trademark and was patented - a very early example of fashion branding. The pattern of alternating brown and beige squares was known as Damier (French for chequerboard). It won a gold medal at the exposition and, since its reintroduction in 1996, has become synonymous with the label.