By slot: bags
A guide to bags
More than any other piece, a bag can be read at a glance from across a room, which is why houses put so much into a few recognisable designs. Here’s what to look at once you’re close enough to see how one is made.
Three designs worth knowing
The Chanel 2.55
The V&A dates the design to February 1955, which is where the name comes from: second month, year 55. Its label picks out the quilted leather, the rectangular lock and the chain shoulder strap, and notes that the design stayed unchanged until the 1980s, when Karl Lagerfeld added the CC logo to the clasp. Sotheby’s credits it with introducing the first shoulder strap, “liberating women’s hands”. That’s an auction house’s claim and a large one, but the strap is clearly why the bag still feels modern.
The Hermès Birkin and Kelly
As 60 Minutes tells it, the Birkin dates from 1984, when Pierre-Alexis Dumas’s father sketched a bag for the actress Jane Birkin, seated beside him on a flight to London. The Kelly is, by the same account, the hardest Hermès bag to build, at about 20 hours. To our eye, the appeal of these bags is partly construction and partly how hard they are to get, and the two are not easy to separate.
Bottega Veneta’s intrecciato
This one began as a workaround. Cultured magazine says the sewing machines of the time struggled with thick hide, so artisans wove thin strips of leather into a perforated base instead, producing something both flexible and durable. The house was started in 1966 by Michele Taddei and Renzo Zengiaro, and Cultured dates the weave to 1975 (other accounts place it a little earlier). What makes it interesting is that a technical fix became the house’s signature.
Leather: what the words mean
The useful distinction is how much of the hide’s surface is left. The Leather Working Group defines full grain as leather that has kept its entire grain, with nothing removed by corrective treatment, and corrected grain as leather whose grain has been partly buffed away and then improved with a finish. Neither is automatically right for every bag, since a corrected finish can be more uniform, but only an unblemished hide can go without correction.
Stitching
Hermès’s saddle stitch, 60 Minutes reports, is sewn with two needles and beeswax-coated linen thread, and the house says its knot can’t be replicated by a machine. Whatever you think of that claim, stitching is the easiest thing on a bag to inspect, and it tells you more than a logo does.
What we look at
Our own checklist, not sourced fact:
- Handles and strap ends. They carry the load, and they’re where shortcuts show first.
- Edges. Neatly finished edges take more time than raw or quickly painted ones.
- Hardware. Does it feel solid, and do the closures line up cleanly?
- The inside. A careful interior usually means care everywhere else.
- In the game: size and material usually move the price more than colour does. Exotic skins and structured leather tend to sit above soft canvas in the same line.
Next: A guide to shoes