Most travel books begin with a place you can book a flight to. Louis Vuitton has taken a different route with Tempo Point, a sketchbook that published on October 16 and describes a city that exists only on its pages. The book is the latest in the House’s Travel Book collection, and it is the first to abandon the real world entirely. What it trades for geography is a fictional metropolis drawn by the virtual pop group K/DA, formed by four playable champions from Riot Games‘ League of Legends: Ahri, Evelynn, Kai’Sa, and Akali.
On paper, the pairing of a Parisian luxury house, a game publisher, and a fictional girl group looks like a marketing exercise. Looked at more closely, it is a test of what a printed object can still do when the subject is invented. The result sits at the point where three worlds that rarely share a bookshelf begin to overlap.
Sixteen Years of Real Cities, Now An Imagined One
The Travel Book collection began in 2010 and has since handed its sketchbooks to artists from many countries, each assigned a city, a countryside, or a stretch of wilderness. The rule was always that the drawings would be the travelogue, and the artist’s eye would stand in for a guidebook. Tempo Point keeps that logic and removes the map. The place is an argument about perception rather than a record of it.
That shift matters. A sketchbook of Kyoto or Marrakech carries an implicit promise of accuracy, even when the artist bends it. A sketchbook of an invented city makes no such promise, which frees the drawings to behave like the game world they came from: layered, restless, and built to hold several moods at once.
Gaming Culture Meets The Object
The collaboration has a longer history than this book. In 2019, Louis Vuitton built a Trophy Trunk for the League of Legends World Championship and gave Nicolas Ghesquière, Artistic Director of Women’s Collections, a hand in designing skins for the champions Qiyana and Senna. The partnership then produced a capsule of apparel, bags, and accessories. In 2020, the House dressed K/DA and Seraphine for pre-concert promotions, and singer Lexie Liu wore Louis Vuitton onstage at the Worlds Opening Ceremony.
Each of those projects treated the gaming audience as a fashion audience. Tempo Point makes a different bet. It asks whether that audience will engage with a bound, printed artifact, something that asks for time rather than a screen tap. The book’s text runs in English, French, and Chinese, and its contents include a biography of K/DA and a travelogue that reads like the connective tissue between a game’s lore and a music release. For a readership raised on digital worlds, the paper object becomes a kind of relic.
Finally, there is a reason a fashion house with a global e-commerce business would invest in cloth-bound hardcovers, seven-color printing, and a silk-screened cover. Print slows a viewer down. A drawing on a page has weight, grain, and a fixed size, and it cannot be scrolled past. In a feed-driven culture, that friction is the product. The two editions show how seriously the House takes this. The Standard Edition and the Collector’s Large-Format Edition share the same cloth binding and cover printing, so the price of entry is the object itself. The limited run is a different proposition. Only 30 copies exist, numbered 1 to 30 and signed, bound in leather and presented in a slipcase. Each one is landscape format at 38.4 x 26.3 cm and comes with a vinyl containing four unreleased tracks: “FIRESTARTER,” “WATCH ME,” “NEVER GOING BACK,” and “GIRLS” (with DJ SONA). The binding and box were made in the workshops of Opus Manu Factum in Padua, Italy, a reminder that the House still measures luxury in hours of handwork. Pricing for that edition is available on request, and the copies are sold only in selected Louis Vuitton stores.
That combination of a mass-facing standard edition and a scarce collector tier is familiar from luxury publishing and object design. What is new is the subject matter, a fictional city and a virtual band, wrapped in the same materials used for a nineteenth-century atlas. The contrast is the story.
What The Book Asks of Its Readers
The Travel Book series has always been less about where to go than about how to look for Louis Vuitton. Tempo Point applies that to a world that has no coordinates, and the 70 drawings become a study of how a fan, a designer, and an artist each read the same invented streets. For gaming audiences, the book is an entry point into a fashion house’s visual language. For the fashion audience, it is a way into a game universe that has been building its own culture for years.
Whether the cross-pollination lasts is less clear. Luxury houses have a habit of treating gaming as a campaign rather than a community, and a single book, however well made, does not change that. But Tempo Point does something most collaborations avoid. It gives the audience a physical thing to hold, and asks it to slow down long enough to read.
Discover more of the book in our gallery:
For more on the titles we cover, visit our books section. For the House’s wider record of product and collaborations, see our Louis Vuitton coverage. For the travel writing that the collection has always drawn from, browse our travel section.
