Louis Vuitton and Chanel are two powerhouses of fashion, but which of the two is more expensive and exclusive?
The battle is generally won by Chanel, who offers products that are, on average, much more expensive than Louis Vuitton. It’s also a more exclusive brand, as a direct result of a higher pricing scale. Chanel also beats Louis Vuitton in the most expensive item record.
Read on to learn more about Louis Vuitton and Chanel, and where they fit into the scale of luxurious fashion.
Supreme Fashion
In so many ways, Louis Vuitton can be considered a ‘better’ brand than Chanel. It was founded some fifty years earlier, has been consistently rated as the world’s most valuable luxury brand, and it sits as a subsidiary of a dramatically wealthy conglomerate.
Louis Vuitton is a core component to the LVMH corporation, an expansive group that consists of dozens of the world’s finest brands. It’s joined by the likes of Moet et Chandon, Dior, Zenith, and Sephora, all of which are wealthy and luxurious brands by their own right.
The French-founded company has a staggeringly powerful foothold in the fashion industry, boasting an employee count of more than 120,000 people. When you purchase a Louis Vuitton product, you’re purchasing that power, along with a sense of wealth, status, and achievement.
However, Chanel, while less popular, comes with a heightened sense of status, being as it is a much more expensive brand than even Louis Vuitton. Chanel was founded in France in 1909 and has worked over the last one hundred years to consistently disrupt the fashion industry.
In many cases, it’s suggested that fans of fashion will opt for Louis Vuitton’s bags simply because Chanel is too expensive a brand. This certainly seems to be the case when you examine the price points of both brands, whereupon Chanel always comes out on top.
On the ‘Fashion Pyramid’ of brands, Louis Vuitton sits below Chanel, dropping beneath it by an entire category. In this chart, Chanel is suggested to be a ‘Supreme’ brand, while Louis Vuitton is merely ‘Aspirational’.
In 2019, Louis Vuitton was once again recognized as the most valuable brand by brandstuck.co, who placed Chanel in the number two spot. They determined that Louis Vuitton stood for the highest quality and luxury, and boasted a dramatically powerful heritage.
However, they also stated that Chanel had the best brand strategy and had influenced countless other brands throughout the last century. They highlighted how Chanel had always refrained from ‘following the rules’, a fact that heartily contributed to the brand’s status.
Extreme Cost
We took a journey through the offerings of both Louis Vuitton and Chanel and saw a tangible trend throughout their product lines. Chanel certainly is the more expensive brand and boats a much higher minimum price point on average.
Louis Vuitton is a cheaper label to ‘get into’, and it also offers a more affordable mid-point. While its upper-end products are still considerably expensive, they don’t often come close to the overall value of a comparable Chanel product.
For example, an entry-level Louis Vuitton handbag would set you back around two and a half thousand dollars – a large sum, but it’s luxury fashion, of course. Chanel, on the other hand, would charge you around four and a half thousand dollars for a similar bag.
There’s a serious gulf between the pricing of each brand’s highest prices throughout history, too. Louis Vuitton once infamously offered a one-of-a-kind bag called the Urban Satchel, worth an incredible one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
However, Chanel’s most expensive offering smashed Louis Vuitton’s Urban Satchel into the ground. The Chanel Diamond Forever bag was an extremely limited run of alligator leather bags constructed with the help of more than three hundred diamonds.
It also boasted an eighteen-karat gold chain strap, and only thirteen were made. It was one of the most dramatically opulent handbags ever created, and it was given a price point of more than a quarter of a million dollars.
While Louis Vuitton is expensive, it certainly cannot compete with the rule-breaking opulence and extravagance of Chanel. It’s a more mainstream brand by comparison and uses a much more traditional operating model to entertain its fanbase.
Of course, Louis Vuitton does also practice the regular mass destruction of its finest unsold products, so perhaps it isn’t all that mundane a brand. Ultimately, the choice is up to you, as the consumer, to decide which brand you’ll opt for.