What really happened at Milan and Rome’s Supreme x Louis Vuitton drop

Not everyone could know this but the most hyped collaboration of the year, the one between Supreme x Louis Vuitton, dropped even in our beautiful country - even though the darkest forecasts said it wouldn’t have happened.
Among the one who knew, and maybe even tried to go and buy some items, complications hadn’t delay in coming. Anything, literally anything, happened. 

But what really went down the day of the drop?

The truth is that, besides some surreal versions and not so believable details, it is true that things have been handled pretty bad both on the store side and on a wider company situation. Unlikely the pop ups of the previous weeks that, ignoring the robberies and threatenings that made the company choose to delay the other programmed pop-up stores, they were all regulated and fairly well managed while the in store drops have felt the lack of a detailed management from above.

First of all the store-managers, and consequently the sale assistants, in Milan were not aware of the proportions of the LV x Supreme phenomenon. As it may seem paradoxical, they were not required to know it, while the company, which was clearly aware of it, would have had the responsibility to inform them. Another problem was the impossibility for store managers both in Rome and Milan to have an actual idea of the stock quantity until the arrival of the items in-store that, in the case of Milan, occurred the night before and in the case of Rome the very same morning of the drop.
This factor certainly did not help an already precarious organization surely fueled by misinformation.

The impossibility of determining the stock also damaged many Louis Vuitton VIP customers who found out, after weeks of correspondence with their sale assistant or store manager, not to have the objects promised them - a situation that hadn’t occurred on Louis Vuitton previous collaborations like LV x Fragment Tokyo or LV x Chapman. Finally, in both cities, it was decided to handle the drop only by appointments and to allocate the (rather scarce) stock among VIP customers only.

In Milan, where the news of the drop was more known, the store in via Monte Napoleone was taken under siege, but to all attendants without an appointment it was said that the Supreme x Louis Vuitton capsule was not present in store among the total disbelief of the best informed - it would also seem that, for the avoidance of reselling, employees have been forbidden to buy the collection. In Rome, however, having passed the news quietly, there was no mob and it was also possible for some lucky boys interested in the collaboration, but without appointment, to access the store.

The management of the drop, in spite of some organizational shortcomings and a lot of bad luck, was for few the lucky shot to get their favorite pieces of the collaboration, without having to book a flight far away or spend days (and nights) in a row.