Will She Make the Next Birkin Bag?

“The bag, it carries your issues and carries your secrets and techniques,” Priscila Alexandre Spring mentioned. The 43-year-old inventive director of leather-based items at Hermès sat in her workplace in Pantin, simply outdoors of Paris, explaining what she preferred about designing luggage — specifically, the connection between “your personal life and your exterior life.”

Ms. Alexandre Spring joined the Hermès leather-based items métier in 2015, and in 2020 she was appointed to her present position. Hermès, which started in 1837 as a saddle maker, is a reputation that comes with intimations of cash (luggage usually promote for greater than $10,000), shortage (if you may get your palms on one) and craftsmanship (every is handmade by a single craftsperson). Most individuals have heard of the Kelly bag (named for Grace Kelly) or the Birkin (named for Jane Birkin) and the myriad celebrities who tote them.

It’s Ms. Alexandre Spring’s job to make the subsequent massive one.

Born in Canada, Ms. Alexandre Spring grew up within the south of Portugal. Her Portuguese father and Mozambican mom have been each academics who needed their daughter to be curious concerning the world and have a basic training. She realized 5 languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian) and studied piano, flute, violin and ballet.

At 13, she switched to basketball, which she performed till she was 25. “Perhaps this is the reason, for me, it’s actually vital to work inside a group,” Ms. Alexandre Spring mentioned. She retains an Hermès baseball glove in her workplace alongside stacks of artwork books — “Margiela: Les Années Hermès,” Jamel Shabazz’s “A Time Earlier than Crack.”

She studied vogue design on the Lisbon College of Structure, then moved to Paris and bounced round design homes, working first for the Portuguese designer Felipe Oliveira Baptista, then designing males’s ready-to-wear for Louis Vuitton, then as an adjunct stylist for Balenciaga. She moved to New York in 2008 to hitch Proenza Schouler.

In New York, she lived principally within the East Village and freelanced, designing sneakers for Marc by Marc Jacobs. “Downtown New York, it’s like a small city,” she mentioned. Quickly sufficient, she bumped into Humberto Leon and Carol Lim of the erstwhile cool-kids boutique Opening Ceremony, who employed her in 2010.

When Mr. Leon and Ms. Lim turned the designers of Kenzo, Ms. Alexandre Spring joined them in Paris as an adjunct stylist, splitting her life between France and the USA, 15 days at a time. After a yr of forwards and backwards, she moved again to Paris full time.

Ms. Alexandre Spring, who lives along with her American husband and two youngsters within the Marais, likens the design course of to a pingpong recreation: a dialogue between her fellow designers and artisans. As a primary step, she’ll do a sketch, which she then takes to prototype makers, whose workshop is only a few steps away. They talk about measurement, performance, even issues just like the sound the {hardware} makes when the bag closes.

For the Arçon bag, Ms. Alexandre Spring was impressed by the form of the flap of a saddle. However then one other inspiration got here to her, she mentioned.

“I used to be a guide that was speaking about pockets within the nineteenth century, how males had about seven pockets of their jackets, pockets of their little vests and pockets of their pants, and girls may have just one pocket that they needed to disguise beneath their skirt. And that was type of the start of emancipation of ladies. When skirts turned smaller and tighter to the physique, they only took the pocket up from beneath the skirt and put it outdoors.”

“In order that’s how this pocket got here right here,” she mentioned, pointing to an angled zip pocket, harking back to a slash pocket on a skirt or trousers, on a chocolate brown Arçon. A hook was added for keys or gloves.

One other bag Ms. Alexandre Spring designed, the Petite Course, which implies a little bit errand in French or a little bit trip, was smaller, extra ergonomic — “for a sports activities automotive,” she mentioned. “You set your pockets and your keys in it and also you go.

As soon as Ms. Alexandre Spring and her group are happy with a design, they make it out of salpa, a cloth that’s just like leather-based, a course of she compares to Frankenstein’s monster. “We make them small, we make them massive,” she mentioned.

The bag is then produced in one among 22 Hermès leather-based workshops in France. Amongst them is Maroquinerie Saint Antoine, a workshop within the twelfth arrondissement of Paris, the place greater than 100 apron-clad workers assemble luggage. They’re principally longtime craftspeople however embrace a category of a couple of dozen trainees whose prior careers included barmaid, sheep breeder and bus driver.

Amongst moments of workplace whimsy (bowls of sweet and photographs of events are pasted to the desks), there’s the occasional crocodile Birkin or a Haut à Courroies made from Volynka leather-based salvaged from a 1786 shipwreck, which gave the house a pungent, smoky beef jerky scent.

When requested about potential designs on the horizon, Ms. Alexandre Spring demurred. In a single nook of a workshop was a decades-old physician bag she took from the Hermès archives for potential inspiration. Elsewhere within the workshop, ropes have been coiled on a desk.

“Every part is a piece in progress,” she mentioned. “However, yeah, we’re attempting a brand new factor with ropes, however we don’t know if it’s going to work.” It will possibly take between six months and 6 years to create a brand new design.

Her group produces 10 new luggage for every season for the boys’s and girls’s collections, which, in keeping with Ms. Alexandre Spring, “is just not lots in comparison with locations the place you may have collections of 30 new luggage.”

“However generally,” she mentioned, “I can consider 10 luggage a day.”