Travel Trunks Forever
Vintage luggage decals offer a glimpse of international travel in the 20th Century
Remember watching old movies that depicted travel in the early 20th century? Steamer trunks piled up on the dock following an exciting Atlantic crossing.
I was always enamored of those trunks, and the international travel they represented, so was pretty excited when I was 13 and got my own for sleep-away camp. A few years later, packed full of monogrammed sweaters, it went with me to college and it eventually served as a coffee table in more than one apartment. Definitely a useful thing, but mine was a plain-Jane version, black with silver trim, missing those nifty travel stickers I’d seen on the steamer trunks from the movies.
I don’t remember when my trunk and I parted ways—it’s no longer in my possession—but its absence hasn’t quelled my quest for those travel decals. This summer wiling away some time at one of our favorite local antique stores, Broadway Antique Market (BAM), we hit the jackpot when we discovered an amazing cache of vintage luggage decals. We’re both fans of vintage travel posters and memorabilia, (Dan was an airline brat growing up) and the Lilliputian decals offered us the opportunity to create a collection that is unusual, and easy to store.
The history of these labels which were either affixed to travelers’ trunks, or saved in travel albums, is covered thoroughly in Francisca Matteoli’s World Tour–Vintage hotel labels from the collection of Gaston-Louis Vuitton. LV clearly knows trunks, so the company’s focus on the vintage labels for travel trunks isn’t surprising.
Two years ago, we got to see the terrific exhibit LOUIS 200 in NYC. Created to celebrate Louis Vuitton's bicentennial birthday, the “200 Trunks, 200 Visionaries" project invited individuals whose focus spanned arts and culture, the sciences, sports, and global causes “to personalize a metaphorical blank canvas” using trunks that were approximately the same size as the original trunk Louis designed in the 1850s.
It was a fun (and free) experience, but also a little sad, as the exhibit was held in the defunct Barney’s store on Madison Ave. The good news was that for the exhibit they resurrected Fred’s, Barney’s iconic eatery, so at least we got to have the chopped salad.
DXO is an outstanding archivist, and if you’re interested, you can view a complete set of photos of our travel decals in this Google photo album. Additionally, if you want to sort the decals by city, country, shape, and other characteristics, you can do that in this Airtable view.
Do you have any travel-related collections? If so, we’d love to hear about them.
Lately, refrigerator magnets are how we collect travel memories (also, we have actual memories that still work).