As pop-ups blur together, Louis Vuitton is playing the long game in city life

Recently, a row of “giant books” appeared on Shanghai’s Yuyuan Road. Their orange, pink, dark green and burgundy “spines” sit beneath the plane trees, interspersed with Louis Vuitton’s name and Monogram motif, turning a street already rich in cultural history into something that seems to have grown out of the pages of a book. The installation is part of Louis Vuitton’s latest La Bibliothèque pop-up. Visitors can read, have coffee, or select brand imagery and materials to bind into their own albums. Alongside titles such as the City Guide and Fashion Eye, Louis Vuitton has also worked with Baixin Bookstore, Archipelago Books and Paper Moon Bookstore on a special reading list, bringing a more distinctly Shanghai perspective to the project through the eyes of local booksellers. In megacities such as Shanghai and Beijing, popular neighborhoods including Yuyuan Road and the Drum Tower area have long become battlegrounds for brand attention. For Louis Vuitton, however, the point is not simply to secure another fashionable address, but to use each urban project to keep reading the city anew — and to find a different way to express itself each time. Writing the city together, through books What matters is not simply getting into a neighborhood, but what a brand brings with it. A product launch, collaboration or holiday campaign can all provide a reason to enter the street. But in many cases, the neighborhood supplies little more than foot traffic and atmosphere; once the activation ends, the connection between brand and place quickly fades. Louis Vuitton’s advantage is that it does not need to invent a new story for every urban project. It already has a cultural archive built over decades, with books among its most enduring and accessible points of connection with local audiences. Publishing has long been part of the house’s cultural universe, anchored by travel as a recurring theme. From the City Guide and Travel Book to Fashion Eye, Louis Vuitton has documented destinations through urban observation, art and photography, steadily building a body of content that helps the brand understand cities and find ways to enter them. First launched in 1998, the City Guide is a central part of this urban content system. For each city, Louis Vuitton brings in journalists, writers, artists, architects and local cultural figures to recommend and interpret the city through their own perspectives. That perspective carries an immediate sense of relevance. Someone living in Shanghai may be curious to see how a global brand reads the city they know; someone planning a trip to Beijing or Chengdu may use it as a way into an unfamiliar destination. More broadly, the City Guide offers another lens: how an international house tells the story of a Chinese city with local creators, and which details of everyday life it chooses to notice. More importantly, that relevance is not one-off. The City Guide is not a fixed body of work, but a content system that continues to evolve as cities themselves change. In 2023, the house’s “Nóng Hó, Shanghai” pop-up was built around an updated Shanghai edition. In 2024, “Beijing Fun” arrived alongside a new Beijing edition. In 2025, Louis Vuitton introduced its first Chengdu edition, which became the starting point for the “Chengdu, Let’s Play” pop-up. From refreshed editions of Shanghai and Beijing to the addition of Chengdu, the City Guide keeps evolving with the cities it covers, allowing the same content asset to take on new local contexts. This also echoes Bain’s recent assessment of international brands in China: as the “halo effect” once enjoyed by global brands weakens, they need to move closer to local consumers. For luxury houses, that means strengthening the connection through content and experiences with greater local relevance. This is where the City Guide earns its value. It may speak in Louis Vuitton’s language of travel, but its point of entry is always a city that consumers live in, know, or hope to visit. That sense of “this is about me” gives people a reason to move closer to the brand. From entering cities to sustaining urban presence But having content is only the first step. Long-built cultural assets answer the question of what a brand brings into a city. The harder test is whether, once there, that content can find a way to connect with the place itself. As early as the summer of 2023, Louis Vuitton opened three pop-up bookstores on Yongjia Road, Fengxian Road and Wukang Road in Shanghai, bringing travel-themed publications and coffee into street-facing spaces. Lines formed outside all three, and the then relatively novel mix of “bookstore + neighborhood” quickly became a visible part of Shanghai’s urban consumption scene. The house did not stop at the bookstore format. In the projects that followed, it moved deeper into the city, looking to local history, culture and ways of life for new points of entry. In October 2023, Louis Vuitton launched the “Nóng Hó, Shanghai” pop-up in Shanghai. Centered on Suzhou Creek, a waterway that has witnessed the city’s transformation, the project included architecture tours, film screenings, jazz performances and cultural talks, allowing the programming to grow out of the place itself. The Chinese-language Louis Vuitton [EXTENDED] podcast, launched at the same time, took that reading of the city into audio, moving from Suzhou Creek to Shanghai breakfast staples such as the “Four Heavenly Kings” and butter bread, grounding the brand’s view of Shanghai in rivers, food and everyday life. In Beijing, Louis Vuitton took a different approach. In July 2024, “Beijing Fun” unfolded across four locations, 798 Art District, the Drum Tower, Liangma River and China World, each reflecting a different side of the city, from contemporary art and old-city life to public leisure and modern commerce. Rather than reducing Beijing to a single place, the brand used several coexisting urban scenes to build a more layered picture of the city. Later projects pushed further into the distinct character of each city, while linking local references with contemporary experience. At the Shanghai Postal Museum, Louis Vuitton drew on the original communications function of the century-old building, using postcards, stamps, postmarks and mailing to revive the rituals of the letter-writing era, while adding AI interaction to connect traditional communication with digital life. In Chengdu, the entry point became “shua,” a distinctly local idea of leisure that reflects the city’s pace and social habits. From there, the project expanded beyond reading into tea, fragrance, dining and local performance. More notably, this approach does not require the brand to move to a new city each time. Shanghai itself can be entered again and again. The three 2023 bookstores connected the brand with neighborhood life and street-level retail; “Nóng Hó, Shanghai” used Suzhou Creek to explore urban history, architecture and food culture; the Shanghai Postal Museum drew on memories of communication; and today’s La Bibliothèque on Yuyuan Road brings local bookstores, reading, printing and craft into a living neighborhood. Each project takes place in the same city, but asks a different question and draws on a different set of urban references. This suggests that Louis Vuitton’s idea of localization is not about assigning a fixed label to each city. Shanghai is more than Suzhou Creek, just as Beijing cannot be reduced to the Drum Tower or 798. Cities change, and within them are different neighborhoods, memories and ways of life. Each return requires the brand to find a new, underexplored facet, then decide which content and experiences can best bring it to life. That gives this urban approach two forms of reach. It can expand outward into cities such as Beijing and Chengdu, while also returning to Shanghai to find new material in its rivers, postal history, bookstores and neighborhood life. What Louis Vuitton has developed is a way of repeatedly rereading a city: understanding the place, finding the right point of entry, then drawing on publishing, art, sound, food and craft to turn that reading into something the public can take part in. The new battleground is consumers’ ‘non-shopping time’ This capability matters more today because the way brands and consumers encounter one another is changing. Consumers no longer get to know a brand only through malls and stores. Luxury malls and flagships still play a central role in display and sales, but cafés, bookstores, independent retail and public urban spaces now offer more unplanned points of contact. A brand may appear during a walk, at an exhibition or over coffee, rather than waiting for consumers to enter a store with a purchase already in mind. As brands move from stores into neighborhoods, they are entering not only new spaces, but different kinds of consumer time. Malls tend to serve more purposeful shopping and browsing, while neighborhoods are woven into walks, coffee breaks, exhibitions and meetings with friends, moments of “non-shopping time.” These everyday hours may once have had little to do with brands, but they are becoming new settings in which recognition and memory are built. The brands that can enter these moments most naturally have a better chance of becoming part of consumers’ everyday lives. Louis Vuitton La Bibliothèque on Yuyuan Road is a case in point. The giant book spines draw the eye, but what makes people linger are the reading, album-binding and screen-printing experiences. These are not DIY add-ons designed simply to increase interaction. They grow naturally out of the house’s traditions of books and craft, turning content rooted in publishing and craftsmanship into something experienced within the rhythm of everyday city life. So as more brands move into neighborhoods, the real divide is no longer who secures the more fashionable address, but who can keep giving people reasons to stop, take part and come closer again. Louis Vuitton’s projects over the years have linked a series of short-term activations into a more enduring relationship with the city: cultural assets provide the reason to enter, local translation makes the brand relevant to the present, and repeated returns allow that relationship to outlast the event itself. Pop-ups end. The same address moves on to the next brand, and the installations come down. What remains is whether people still remember why the brand was there, and what they read, made or felt while it was. Only when those experiences become embedded in the memory of a street, a walk or a city can a brief brand appearance leave a longer trace.

As pop-ups blur together, Louis Vuitton is playing the long game in city life

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As pop-ups blur together, Louis Vuitton is playing the long game in city life

How 2026 welcomed ‘Too Cool’ back