Design Your Bag

Creating your own bag is not buying an object. It is going through the way one comes into being — and leaving with an exclusive piece that exists because of you.

It begins with a conversation.

You bring an idea: a shape you have looked for and never found, a bag you once owned and miss, a photograph, sometimes only a feeling. A designer listens, asks the questions that turn it into something buildable, the creating process that decides the project.

Then the idea leaves your head and takes a form you can look at.

A sketch, corrected until the proportions are right. A paper pattern — the flat map of a three-dimensional object, and the stage where mistakes are still inexpensive. Then a prototype in plain material, without leather and without hardware: it exists only to test volume. You hold it, you carry it across the room, and you say what is right and what is wrong. 

Corrections are made second your needs and requests, until the shape is second your imagination.

Only once the prototype is approved does the material arrive.

Leathers are chosen against the light and against your own hands — grain, weight, how they will age on you. Then hardware, lining, the colour of the stitching, the finish of an edge. These are the decisions people imagine come first. They come last, because until now there was nothing certain to put them on.

Fourteen stages in all. Not every one of them needs you: some happen at the bench between sessions, and you see the result rather than the process. Which ones you attend, and how many times you come to Milan, we decide together at the start.

The work takes place in a workshop in the centre of Milan,

by appointment only.

In an exclusive private atelier — access is arranged personally, and that is part of what you are commissioning.

Weeks, not days. A real calendar is set after the first meeting, once the idea is on the table.

Rate on request