Less than a year after Louis Vuitton unveiled its startlingly angular Frank Gehry–designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the luxury brand has opened its petite counterpart, La Galerie. After all, what better time than couture week to fling open to the doors (and garden gates) to one of the most exclusive locations in France: Louis Vuitton’s historic home and atelier located in the Paris suburb, Asnières-sur-Seine. Of course, a garden party was in order.

Vuitton built the famed residence—where fashion types sipped on Champagne and green juice Sunday afternoon—in the Seine-side suburb in 1959. Production had outgrown his petite Paris atelier and in this new, riverside locale he could easily import poplar wood—it arrived atop a Louis Vuitton barge—for his hefty, now-iconic trunks. He soon built a series of structures in the glass-and-steel Eiffel style, which, through the following century, bore witness to a sum of history-making events—the creation of the brand’s signature Monogram pattern, the Houdini Challenge to test its patented locks—and countless family dinners of pot au feu .

Though the family moved out of the home in 1964, the atelier remained in business, specializing in hard-sided luggage and, perhaps most importantly, housing the brand’s vast archive. For the permanent show in the newly opened La Galerie—a stark series of rooms with vaulted steel-and-wood ceilings—curator Judith Clark sifted through 165,000 documents and 23,000 objects to select a handful of pieces that would give insight into the storied history of the brand. In the show, never-before-seen items like Gaston-Louis Vuitton’s letters, Loïe Fuller’s dance accessories, and Frank Gehry’s design for Fondation Louis Vuitton join luggage, objects, and clothing created by the label over the years. Inspired by a wood cube puzzle she found in the archives, Clark displayed all of the objects and clothing, organized by theme, in and around arrangements of poplar boxes or wood planks on wheels.

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