Louis Vuitton's Objets Nomades Collection Taps Top Designers

India Mahdavi never stops moving—Tehran, Cambridge, Heidelberg, Vence, New York. “I’m a nomad,” says the Irano-Egyptian designer, parked, for the moment, in Paris. “I grew up this way, from one country to another—you’re right there one moment and some- where else the next.”

So when Louis Vuitton tapped Mahdavi to dream up demountable furnishings for its Objets Nomades collection—a line of experimental seats, lanterns, even a skinny valet, inspired by the spirit of travel and the French house’s special orders of yore (such as the candy-striped cot that unfolded from a trunk, which was created in 1865 and commissioned by clients like French explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza)—her mind’s eye didn’t have to travel far.

Mahdavi looked to tray tables in the Far East for inspiration: “They appear at teatime and disappear for the siesta,” she explains. Hers, swathed in the supple cerulean leather you might find on one of the brand’s covetable hand- bags, has an accordion base that folds up into a small book shape (equipped with a handle for simple transport). Its removable top is emblazoned with an abstract design in leather marquetry. “We started with the evil eye,” she says of the tray top’s graphic design. “As the world is changing, we all need a lucky charm as an antidote to evil spirits.”

Since it launched in 2012, Vuitton’s Objets Nomades collection has encouraged a handful of top design talents, including Nendo, Marcel Wanders, and Barber & Osgerby, to push the boundaries of functional objects. And this April, during Milan Design Week, as Vuitton added Mahdavi to its roster, the company just unveiled ten radical new designs.

“We’re all exploring what it means to be nomadic,” says Spanish designer Patricia Urquiola, who has created several clever furnishings for the collection over the years. “Everything can be dismantled in an easy way.” In her latest design— which nods to traditional African palaver chairs—the interlocked wood seat and back can be separated, one thrown over each arm, and moved from room to room.

But Vuitton asks for more than smart utility from the designs; they should also contain an element of something a bit more evasive. Not surprisingly, the Brazilian brothers Humberto and Fernando Campana have triumphed in this department. “We like to make bridges between art and design and design and fashion,” says Humberto. Of the leather-wrapped shell-shaped sofa they will launch this year, he says, “This is really just like a comfortable sculpture.”

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