Louis Vuitton built a tiny £8,250 station wagon to carry its colognes to California
Sixty artisans spent 7,000 hours making a miniature Woody Wagon with artist Alex Israel, and only 66 people will ever be allowed to buy one.
Louis Vuitton has found a new place to keep its perfume. The house has unveiled the Woody Wagon Colognes, a miniature wood-panelled station wagon made with the Los Angeles artist Alex Israel, which holds all six fragrances from its California-themed cologne collection. It went up for pre-order on 2 July at £8,250, in an edition of 66, a wink at Route 66, with delivery promised for late September.
The wagon itself is an exercise in expensive absurdity taken seriously. Sixty artisans spent more than 7,000 hours assembling its 219 parts, engraving the Monogram motif into its wooden doors and stamping Monogram flowers onto its wheels. The body pairs mahogany with the semi-aged natural leather Vuitton usually reserves for its trunks. The house has been building luggage for other people’s journeys since 1854, and here the journey is imaginary and the passengers are perfume.
Israel has been Vuitton fragrance’s house artist since 2019, when the label revived its perfume division after a gap of roughly ninety years and asked him to shape the bottles and imagery for master perfumer Jacques Cavallier Belletrud’s California colognes. The scale of the collaboration keeps creeping upward. In 2024 the pair produced Ocean BLVD, a two-metre leather-clad model of an imaginary LA street, which took 20 artisans about 500 hours. The Woody Wagon required fourteen times the labour for something much smaller. The six colognes inside are the existing line rather than new scents, so the craftsmanship, and the price, sit almost entirely in the object itself.
Anyone unwilling to part with the price of a small actual car can settle for the accompanying travel cases, released in editions of 100 at £915 each. Made in translucent resin printed with the Monogram, they wrap three of the colognes in gradients borrowed from Israel’s palette, sunrise orange for Sun Song, sunset pink fading to blue for California Dream, and deepening ocean blues for Afternoon Swim.
Israel, for his part, is playing the whole thing charmingly straight. The Woody Wagon, he says, has always meant a certain Californian freedom, surfboard on the roof and family in the back. “In this case, the family is our six Cologne perfumes.”
Credits:
Images courtesy of Louis Vuitton
Words: Roisin Teeling @roisinteeling
LouisVuitton.com
