Sniff out the new It bags
HINT: IF YOU WANT TO MAKE
your bathroom shelves look infinitely chicer in an instant, then pop a bottle of Byredo fragrance on them. The Swedish brand’s monochrome, pared-back packaging radiates quiet, cool luxury; think of them as the olfactory equivalent of a Céline coat or a Pierre Jeanneret chair. And, yes, the excellently monikered (see Gypsy Water, Baudelaire…) unusual, but not too unusual, fragrances smell as good as the bottles look.
So wouldn’t it be great if you could sprinkle some of that Byredo magic on your wardrobe? Well, now you can, with the launch of the brand’s first full bag collection, debuting in Selfridges’ newly reopened accessories department this week. ‘Fragrance is very much an invisible medium. I was really interested in defining a tangible product that spoke to people in a physical way through our aesthetic,’ explains Ben Gorham ( left), the Swedish-born, half-indian, half- Canadian founder of the house.
For Gorham, who pivoted from a career in professional basketball to found Byredo in 2006, the expansion into leather goods was a natural progression for the brand. ‘ The handbag is quite intimate, especially for women; there’s a kind of synergy with how people feel about the fragrance they wear’. Certainly, you can see Gorham’s ‘handwriting’ in the collection. ‘Byredo is very much about quality and – it sounds like a cliché – authenticity. I think products, whether fragrance or leather, need to come from a personal place and need to have an origin that’s authentic.’
The bag collection’s modern, minimal aesthetic echoes that of the fragrance bottles – and pulls off the coup of being both classic and thoroughly of-the-moment, luxurious but not ostentatious. Made in Italy, highlights include the Chanda shopper, the ladylike Amita and the angular Seema, which promise to lend any outfit a semblance of cool-chic in the same way that the perfumes do to a dressing table.
Superfluous hardware and detailing are out; clean lines are in. Gorham describes the bags simply as ‘geometric’, explaining that the strong silhouettes were a deliberate rejection of the ‘expressive, innovative designs that weren’t that functional’, which he saw everywhere. ‘For this first chapter, my focus was about making extremely well-made, functional bags. The initial idea is very much on creating a bag that’s unique but as simple as possible’. Simple? Yes. Effective? Certainly.