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How ethical is Louis Vuitton, one of the world’s biggest luxury clothing and accessories brands? Unfortunately, our reviews show the brand has consistently fallen short in sustainability for years now. Louis Vuitton’s recent spring/summer ’27 runway show, which featured a giant fake waterfall in the midst of a climate crisis-induced heatwave, only emphasises the brand’s indifference to this very real global issue.
This article is based on the Louis Vuitton rating published in January 2026 and may not reflect claims the brand has made since then. Our ratings analysts are constantly rerating the thousands of brands you can check on our directory.
Is Louis Vuitton addressing its impact on people, the planet, and animals?
Since its inception in 1854, Louis Vuitton has been synonymous with luxury, crafting iconic handbags and accessories that have become status symbols worldwide. Founded in Paris by the visionary trunk-maker Louis Vuitton, the brand’s signature monogram and commitment to craftsmanship have defined fashion for over a century.
The appointment in 2018 of the late Virgil Abloh as Louis Vuitton’s artistic director of menswear shook up the 164-year-old French fashion house, as well as the whole fashion industry. The appointment late American designer, DJ, and stylist was seen as democratising luxury fashion, bringing youth culture to an elite brand, and paving the way for more exciting designers to join the house, like Pharrell Williams in 2023, who remains as creative director today. Williams’ conceptual runway presentations have made headlines, not least the most recent spring/summer ’27 show, which featured a giant fake waterfall in the midst of some of Paris’ hottest days on record. The brand claimed that all the water used was taken from and returned to the city’s water supply as part of a closed-loop system, but the spectacle demonstrated Louis Vuitton’s ongoing tone-deaf approach to the climate crisis.
With that, then, is Louis Vuitton doing when it comes to its impact on people, the planet, and animals? Are the brand’s sustainable practices as modern as its artistic vision? In short, how ethical is Louis Vuitton?
Environmental impact
Luxury label Louis Vuitton rates “It’s a Start” for the planet, an improvement from its past “Not Good Enough” rating. While it’s set a science based target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in both its direct operations and supply chain and claims it’s on track, we’d like to see solid evidence of this. Its claims about using Leather Working Group certified tanneries also lack specifics and further details about the certifications. The brand uses some lower-impact materials and recycles some of its offcuts to minimise textile waste, but none of this is going far enough.
Louis Vuitton has taken a few positive steps in the right direction but it needs to put more work into its transparency and impact reduction to improve further.
Labour conditions
Unfortunately, the brand has not improved on the labour front and still scores “Not Good Enough” for its treatment of workers across the supply chain.
Sadly, none of its supply chain is certified by crucial labour standards that help ensure worker health and safety and other rights. There is no evidence Louis Vuitton ensures payment of a living wage in any part of its supply chain, provides financial security to its suppliers, or that it implements practices to support diversity and inclusion. And while the brand claims to audit some of its supply chain, we found nothing to state what percentage, nor does it publish a breakdown of its suppliers’ locations.
The theme here is a lack of specificity and vagueness. Why can’t Louis Vuitton tell us where its suppliers are? And why hasn’t it, at the very least, looked into adopting credible definitions of a living wage from industry bodies like the Asia Floor Wage Alliance? Louis Vuitton has so much financial and influential power that there is no excuse for coming up short in labour justice. People are the backbone of the fashion industry, after all.
Animal welfare
Louis Vuitton is “Not Good Enough” for animals. It has a basic formal policy to protect animal welfare, but the policy doesn’t align with the Five Domains of Animal Welfare, which is disappointing, especially as such a large portion of its business relies on leather goods.
Louis Vuitton uses leather, wool, down, angora, exotic animal hair, and exotic animal skin. Some of these materials are from certified or recycled sources as alternatives to conventional wool, cashmere, and down, but the brand needs to do much more in this area. It also continues to use fur while many other prominent luxury brands adjacent to the French retailer have woken up to ethical issues with this cruel material and banned it, including Gucci, Burberry, and Coach. And in 2020, the brand issued claims that 100% of the animals used for its products are “humanely farmed”, but PETA quickly shut this down, explaining that the exotic skins industry could never be considered humane. Such a blatant disregard for the wellbeing of the sentient creatures we share the planet with is outdated, and with so many vegan fabric innovations out there, using them in such a way simply isn’t necessary any more.
Overall rating: ‘Not Good Enough’
Louis Vuitton is rated “Not Good Enough” overall based on information from the research done by our team at Good On You. This rating hasn’t improved since our previous assessment of the brand, which shows that Louis Vuitton has done little to improve its transparency, and isn’t doing anywhere near enough to address the impact that its practices have on people, the planet, and animals in order to meet the expectations of a new generation of fashion lovers.
Note that Good On You ratings consider hundreds of issues, and it is not possible to list every relevant issue in a summary of the brand’s performance. For more information, see our How We Rate page and our FAQs.
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