Merci Beaucoup
Famous French fashion brand stitches masks for donation near Fort Worth
UPDATE: On May 6, Louis Vuitton donated an additional 2,000 non-surgical face masks to organizations in Texas, including Children’s Health in Dallas and the Houston Food Bank.
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While some fashion brands have begun crafting their own for-sale face masks to help citizens slow the spread of coronavirus, Louis Vuitton has turned its workshops toward sewing non-surgical cloth masks for donation.
The luxury label recently gave 2,000 face masks to 19 local organizations in Keene County, about 29 miles south of Fort Worth and near its Louis Vuitton Rochambeau Ranch workshop in Johnson County.
With the help of County Judge Roger Harmon and his administration, the Parisian label's masks will be distributed to groups such as food pantries and centers that provide free meals to the communities of Cleburne, Burleson, Alvarado, and Joshua.
Louis Vuitton has also repurposed its four other American workshops in Piscataway, New Jersey, and Ontario, San Dimas, and Irwindale, California, to produce face masks.
The face masks are made of cotton cloth with the ability to be reused, washed, and adjusted to better fit a variety of users. Collectively, when the workshops are at efficiency, artisans across the five workshops will create hundreds of thousands of masks, which Louis Vuitton will continue to work with local organizations to donate and distribute in states currently most heavily impacted by COVID-19.
The American workshops join the label's French workshops, which have also re-opened to support the production of non-surgical face masks for donation to healthcare workers and nursing homes in France.
Louis Vuitton has also started producing gowns in its ready-to-wear atelier and headquarters located on Paris' rue du Pont Neuf. These gowns will be provided to frontline workers in six Parisian hospitals of the "Assistance Publique – Hôpitaux de Paris," also known as AP-HP (the regional hospital center operating in Paris and its surroundings), who are taking care of patients suffering from COVID-19.