Traversing Transnational Luxury

The Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL) and daughter company Compagnie Internationale des Grands Hotels managed a network of hotels and train routes with sleeper and dining cars. These appealed to elite travellers and connected metropolitan centres and tourist destinations across Europe, Asia and Africa. These semi-public spaces, both the hotels and train carriages, have been identified as markers of luxury and exclusivity built to a similar style and standard, offering the same quality in comfort, safety and service throughout Europe’s main cities and destinations. 

While this “brand identity” was one of the company’s main selling points, its visual language and advertisement posters incorporated local, vernacular and exoticized elements to allure its clients. This elective approaches these semi-public interiors as a transnational continuous space that (re)produced and transferred a shared, collect identity between Europe’s upper-class communities, parallel to the technoscientific integration of Europe. This elective specifically focuses on how these identities, both of the CIWL as a brand and of the European upper class, were visualised and translated through promotional and advertisement materials.