With its handbags selling for thousands, Louis Vuitton has built its reputation on the highest quality.
But advertising watchdogs have found the French design house guilty of misleading customers with two advertisements depicting its ‘craftsmen’ – because the bags are not actually made by hand.
Despite ads showing a ‘seamstress with linen thread’ and boasting of ‘infinite patience’, bags bearing the trademark pattern of an interwoven ‘L’ and ‘V’ are predominantly created by machine.
Britain’s Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has banned two Louis Vuitton ads for misleading customers, the Daily Mail reports.
One of the ads depicts a seamstress sewing together a handbag with text that reads, “The seamstress with linen thread and beeswax. A needle, linen thread, beeswax and infinite patience protect each over-stitch from humidity and the passage of time. One could say that a Louis Vuitton bag is a collection of details. But with so much attention lavished on every one, should we only call them details?” The other ad shows a seamstress making a wallet.
The problem–at least for complaining clients–is that Louis Vuitton’s luxury goods are made by machine. Louis Vuitton confessed that sewing machines are used in the process but that the “production of the bags was ‘not automated’ and that there were over 100 stages in the making of each bag,” according to the Daily Mail.
However, that’s not enough to sway the ASA, which maintains the ads are deceptive.
sources: the daily mail, Huffington Post
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