KEY POINTS:
Synchronicity is a wonderful thing. The week we are compiling this Viva issue on the fashion of travel, I find myself at an intimate lunch sitting next to Pietro Beccari, a charming Italian who also just happens to be the senior vice-president of communications and marketing for Louis
Vuitton - a division of the world's largest luxury goods conglomerate MVH Moet Hennessey-Louis Vuitton, and a company that epitomises travel. Indeed, they've been making luggage for the world's most sophisticated travellers since 1854.
Beccari, himself is the ultimate traveller. One week he is in London at Nelson Mandela's 90th birthday - "We were the only normal people there," he laughs about a night spent rubbing shoulders with the likes of Elton John, Oprah Winfrey and Bill Clinton - "the most powerful speaker I've ever heard, he brought tears to my eyes". The next week he is Japan brainstorming a collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Comme des Garcons designer Rei Kawabuko, before heading back to head office in Paris to discuss the next season's fashion collections with Louis Vuitton's designer Marc Jacobs.
Indeed, being responsible for the company's product development - everything from leather goods, shoes, watches, jewellery, accessories through to the ready-to-wear collections - along with advertising, press relationships, key events and the overall image of the Louis Vuitton brand, means Beccari is on the move a lot. In the last six weeks he's been to Bucharest, Delhi, Bangalore, Hong Kong, Italy, Istanbul, London, Sydney and now Auckland (for 24 hours).
For a man who probably spends more time on planes than he does in his own bed, he is a vision of vitality. His secret?
"Spirulina," he laughs. "Every morning I start the day with a drink loaded with lots of fruit. And then I don't eat until the end of the day.
"I try to always sleep when I am on a flight. I am always so exhausted when I jump on a plane. And I never think to myself 'It would be five in the morning at home'. It's important to always be present in the place you are in; to be in the, how do you say, the actuality. I think that time lag, or jet lag, is a mental type of construction. So you can manipulate that by not thinking about it."
An insight into a man who lives and breathes his brand. "At Louis Vuitton - be it my boss, my colleagues - there is a very personal commitment to be present and discover what is happening and changing around the world. There is a sense of being part of a pioneering experience and that's absolutely paramount to what we do. We go out, discover - even if this is to sacrifice something personal, to go, see, learn ..."
And it is this first-hand experience which is the driving message behind Louis Vuitton's current global advertising campaign - a move to bring the focus back to their "core values"; values Beccari describes as being about travel, quality and innovation.
"It was time to redefine the concept of luxury and with Louis Vuitton that is travel. We didn't want to do it in the classical way, through geographical movement, because everybody is doing that now. There are cheap airlines, hotels and the like," he says with a slightly dismissive shrug of his shoulders.
"We wanted to find something more sophisticated, something linked with tradition and history but also very modern. The result is an exploration of the personal journey.
"There is a U2 song," Beccari smiles, "that says 'The more you see, the less you know', and that is exactly what life is all about. The more you go out and discover, the more you realise there is to discover, and the more experiences you accumulate the more you become the person you didn't think you would. Even if we think about metaphysical travel - the notion of seeing, moving, experiencing - the more you change inside."
With tag lines such as 'Where will life take you?', 'Is there any greater journey than love?' and 'A journey brings us face to face with ourselves', the message is most definitely thought-provoking as it interprets the concept of travel in an emotional, rather than physical sense, presenting it as a process of self-discovery.
When it came to choosing who would front the campaign, photographed by Annie Leibowitz, the company looked to people, Beccari says, who had made "extraordinary journeys in the course of full and fascinating lives".
To date this has included Mikhail Gorbachev, tennis stars Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf, movie star Catherine Deneuve and Rolling Stone Keith Richards.
And this month, the latest ad rolls out across the globe featuring Oscar-winning filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter Sofia. The image was shot in Buenos Aires, where Coppola was filming his latest movie, and says Beccari, "aims to capture the unique quality of a father-daughter relationship enriched through shared experience and with a suggestion, as it is with the Louis Vuitton brand, of know-how being passed between the generations. It works, I think, in a subconcious way to evoke this kind of concept".
It is a fascinating and sophisticated approach to the world of travel. We'd expect nothing less from a company like Louis Vuitton. It is, after all, the personal journey which is the most stimulating, always challenging and often rewarding.
And, if you can accessorise it Louis Vuitton along the way, then you know you're on the right track.
