Lanterns of glowing trunks rise through a vast atrium, a globe of luggage hovers above a glass floor and workshops pulse with the deft gestures of artisans. At the Nakanoshima Museum of Art in Osaka, Louis Vuitton: Visionary Journeys—on view from July 15 to September 17, 2025—transforms 170 years of the Maison’s history into an immersive architectural narrative. Conceived by Shohei Shigematsu, partner at the architecture firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), and curated by fashion historian Florence Müller, the show unfolds across eleven thematic galleries that together communicate the Maison’s identity through history, timeless codes, craft and cultural commentary.

Stated to be the first and most extensive edition of the design exhibition staged within a cultural institution, the showcase presents over 1,000 objects alongside 200 Japan-specific artefacts. The presentation—eschewing a linear chronology—creates a sequence of inhabitable sets, each shaped by a theme that offers a curious peek into the Maison’s continual balancing of heritage and reinvention. The museum itself, a black cubical monolith that opened in 2022, amplifies this dramaturgy through its cavernous atriums, dramatic sightlines and controlled play of light. Designed to be both austere and flexible, the venue has quickly become a hub for modern and contemporary art in Japan, with Nakanoshima providing both gravitas and openness for OMA’s scenography to unfold.

The journey into the exhibition opens with Trunkscapes. Within the five-story atrium, eight monumental lanterns, each 12.5 metres tall, are assembled from stacked trunks wrapped in four colours of Monogram washi paper. Their gentle illumination recalls Japanese summer festivals, while giving Louis Vuitton’s iconic trunk a new ceremonial presence. Beyond, at the exhibition entrance, 138 of the Maison’s historic trunks form a hemispherical dome. Mirrored on the black glass floor, the dome nods to a globe, at once a symbol of exploration and a feat of optical theatre demonstrating Louis Vuitton’s structural ingenuity.

“We approached the show as a spatial translation of Louis Vuitton’s legacy; a journey not just through objects but through ideas,” Shigematsu says in an official press statement. “The scenography celebrates the trunk not only as a container of belongings but as a vessel of imagination, stories and cultural exchange.”

Beyond the entrance installation, visitors move through eleven immersive worlds staged across the museum’s galleries. Asnières recreates the Vuitton family home and workshop, complete with stained-glass windows, chevron floors, a rug and horseshoe chairs—the objects, rendered at scale, anchor the brand in its origins. Archival photographs, historical etchings and contemporary illustrations are integrated into the set, charting the evolution of the House from its domestic beginnings to its emergence as a global icon.

Origins envelopes visitors in a basket-looking bamboo-woven armature that holds 320 objects charting six eras of Louis Vuitton’s history. Flat-top trunks, steamer bags and lock systems are suspended within the weave, their utility and elegance revealed as the design DNA of the brand. Bamboo here echoes an integral element in traditional Japanese craft, entwining Louis Vuitton’s evolution with local material culture.

When STIR asked Shigematsu how he decides which aspects of Louis Vuitton’s history should remain ‘fixed’ versus those that can be abstracted or reinterpreted spatially in the setting of the museum, he said, “Louis Vuitton has an exceptional balance of heritage and innovation, and its most symbolic object—the trunk—is itself the crystallisation of a long history of craft and invention. That was the starting point of our concept of the Trunkscape, in which trunks serve as modular units to form different spatial environments. It’s not only about learning historical facts from the archive, but about cherishing the excitement of how those become the foundation for future innovation and ideas. It’s a retrospective with the future in mind.”

Within Expeditions, Louis Vuitton’s history with travel becomes spatial. At the centre of the gallery a hot-air balloon expands into the space, serving as both structure and a screen. Archival trunks and sketches populate its surface, while the collapsible Tilbury trunk rotates on a moving platform where objects are animated as if in transit.

The House’s deep-rooted relationship with Japan emerges most vividly in the section Louis Vuitton and Japan. Here, artefacts and Louis Vuitton pieces are displayed across floating platforms inspired by tatami, the traditional woven mats that structure Japanese interiors, suspended at varied heights and mirrored overhead as luminous ceiling panels. Samurai armour, ceremonial objects, kawaii motifs and collaborations with Rei Kawakubo, Murakami, Yayoi Kusama and NIGO® are arranged into a landscape that embodies cultural exchange as both heritage and reinvention.

Other chapters focus on Louis Vuitton’s materials and codes. The Materials gallery gathers wood, leather, metal and canvas, the four elements of trunk-making into transparent cubes of varying scale, forming suspended clusters that distill the brand to its raw components. From this material foundation, the exhibition shifts to the Monogram Canvas where matter becomes motif. The Monogram is staged as a celestial map; five rotating rings orbit around a vitrine that presents, for the first time, the rediscovered 1897 swatch of the Monogram. Surrounding it, 112 bags form a constellation, transforming the gallery into an observatory of reinvention.

Performance is embedded throughout the showcase. “For each theme, we used the exhibition content to create the space itself, designing an immersive environment directly inspired by and integrated with the content,” notes Shigematsu in the official statement. The Workshop recreates the Asnières atelier as a live stage, where artisans build and personalise trunks beneath arched windows and mirrored skylights. From craft as spectacle, the showcase moves to Testing as choreography; a laboratory where robotic arms named Louise and Louisette open and close bags in rhythmic repetition, while other devices lift and drop trunks to demonstrate durability. Rings etched into the floor echo the concentric patterns of Japanese rock gardens, softening the clinical atmosphere of the lab with a meditative rhythm.

Theatricality reaches a crescendo in Atelier Rarex, where couture garments from the Maison Vendôme workshop are set within ribbed fabric walls that abstract the building’s mansard roof. Mirrored walls expand the garments into endless Parisian boulevards, evoking the glamour of the events such as the Met Gala or the Academy Awards. The final gallery, titled Collaborations, dissolves into four mirrored domes where graffiti artist Stephen Sprouse’s bold graphics, Supreme’s streetwear crossover, Takashi Murakami’s playful anime-inspired motifs and Kusama’s signature polka dots refract across 1,467 facets, creating kaleidoscopic displays that shift with every movement.

The lyrical layering of scales in which objects become architecture and scenography turn into performances also push the boundaries of Shigematsu’s own practice. As he told STIR, “Exhibitions, especially for fashion, challenge us to design for the senses to create an extraordinary experience. The industry’s fast pace and openness to experimentation make working a form of creative training, in which playfulness is embraced to make something beyond the ordinary. I’d like to incorporate this creative freedom, intuition and experimentation into my architecture practice to capture the more intangible aura of exhibition design in buildings.”

The Osaka setting adds resonance to the design showcase. Long a centre of trade and craftsmanship, the city becomes a fitting stage for Louis Vuitton’s narrative of movement and exchange. The exhibition also coincides with the World Expo 2025, amplifying themes of global dialogue while situating them within a local context of cultural bridging.

The strength of Visionary Journeys is not only in the scale of its archive, but how that has been reimagined spatially. Every gallery demonstrates that scenography can act as a form of architecture capable of shaping memory, movement and imagination. In doing so, the showcase makes Louis Vuitton’s heritage tangible as an environment rather than as a static display. Visitors come away with less of an impression of a brand retrospective and more with the sense of having travelled through an unfolding sequence of ideas, each anchored in design, craft, and dialogue.

‘Louis Vuitton: Visionary Journeys’ is on view from July 15 – September 17, 2025, at the Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan.