GOLDEN GIRL
Belgian luxury goods house Delvaux fetes its signature Brillant with a Hollywood-inspired tribute. tama lung travels to Beijing along with artistic director Christina Zeller to meet the Diva
Sixty years is a respectable age for a luxury brand, let alone a single signature product. But when the brand in question is 189 years old, it seems only fitting that its products are incredibly enduring as well. Such is the case with Delvaux, the fine leather luxury goods house established in 1829 by Charles Delvaux, and the Brillant bag first introduced at the 1958 World’s Fair in its hometown of Brussels. To celebrate 60 years of the Brillant, artistic director Christina Zeller travelled to Beijing to open an exclusive popup and exhibition at the luxurious SKP shopping centre. The pop-up, held last month and showcasing the history of the Brillant, also served as the global launch of a new bag, Le Diva Brillant, created especially for the milestone anniversary. “It’s incredible to think the bag has absolutely not aged since 1958,” says Zeller, a former model who joined Delvaux in 2011. “We wanted to go with something a bit more 1950s and ’60s, when bags had a specific frame. It’s manufactured like a box, with a very challenging closure system. Only one side of the closure system needs four hours to be produced, so it takes eight hours just for the metal frame. And then you have the rest of the bag, so I think it needs at least 25 hours of manufacturing.” The intricate design, which drew on automotive technology and watchmaking expertise to achieve the perfect click of the closure system, is intended as a contemporary tribute to the Golden Age of Hollywood. “When you’re young, you dream of being a princess, a queen or a diva. My dream was to be a diva,” Zeller says. “I wish I could have been Greta Garbo or Marlene Dietrich.” The Diva – available in glossy red and black Norwegian bull leather (“the skins in Norway are always extremely good quality because they do not use wires to park the animals”) and a limited-edition black crocodile (“when you think of those divas, you imagine them with their white furs and crocodile bag”) – is also the subject of a short film by American actress and filmmaker Zoe Cassavetes. Starring Pat Cleveland, Charlene Almarvez and Rachel Roberts and set poolside at West Hollywood’s Chateau Marmont, the Thomas Crown–inspired movie celebrates the timelessness of the Diva. “It shows three different ages of women, three different kinds of divas. Because for me you
can be a diva at 20, a diva at 40 or a diva at 70,” Zeller says. “The idea was a kind of complicity among women. I always say I would prefer to have a woman looking at me than a man because when a woman looks at you, it means something very different.” That complicity is something that Zeller has come to associate with Delvaux, an official supplier to the Belgian Royal Court and the inventor of the handbag. The company was founded one year before the country declared independence and has become synonymous with symbolism and surrealism, establishing itself as a “divinely singular label” that doesn’t take itself too seriously. “It’s funny because in Belgium I say that Delvaux is the oldest start-up in the world,” explains Zeller, who has transformed the company from a small player with 10 shops in Belgium to an international powerhouse with almost 50 stores around the world. “We are the oldest fine leather luxury goods company in the world, but we are visible internationally only since early 2012. “It’s still a brand of exception, still a brand very focused on craftsmanship,” she adds. “Maybe what I brought to the company is a more audacious vision than they had. But I stick to the class of the company and for me the modality is not coming from fashion. My challenge is to be very innovative and explore new techniques, to move the company to challenge itself to try something that it would not have imagined five or 10 years before.” Since Zeller took over, Delvaux has been embraced in particular by young Chinese consumers like actresses Crystal Zhang, Zhu Zhu and Chen Ran, and the others who flocked to the pop-up’s grand opening party at SKP. “I think it’s very interesting to see young Asian girls buying Delvaux. They value tradition, they value craftsmanship and they value history,” Zeller says. “I remember I was at the station in Paris and I saw a very lovely Chinese girl wearing a mini Brillant and I was wearing a big one. I said to her, ‘Oh, nice bag,’ and she replied, ‘Nice bag, too.’ We were belonging to some kind of club. I think when you choose a Delvaux it’s not like a very luxury, institutional well-known brand in Asia, so the customers who go for Delvaux have something in common.” It’s this unspoken understanding that underscores everything the brand represents. “For me, we don’t need to explain [the heritage of Delvaux] for 10 hours. It stands out when you look at the bag,” Zeller says. “I think if we are here after more than 180 years, it means something. I think when you know who you are, you don’t need to announce it.”
“When you’re young, you dream of being a princess, a queen or a diva. My dream was to be a diva”