I love bag decorations which is shiny on the bag. I also love bag prints and the bag printer, because the printer can help me make my own bag. Such printed bag you can make with the plastic bag printer.
Despite the custom bag, let us get awareness of the famous bag brand in Italy. The first bags were intended to hold money and were presumably made of leather. The oldest documented mention of bag-making in Italy comes from the twelfth century. In Tuscany some of the best Italian tanneries for working skins were already in production by then. Another city that was prominent in creating Italian bags was Venice, with its bolzieri (the craftsmen who made these bags) and its Arte dei Lavoratori del Cuoio (Leatherworkers’ Guild). Venice was a typically commercial city and its expert artisans made bags of all shapes and sizes, intended for various uses, made in classic skins or in rich cloth (for example velvet, damask and silk), with jewels, pearls, embroidery, lace etc. Soon knitted bags were introduced and in the medieval period bags began to be made with the family crest or the professional guild’s coat of arms emblazoned on them.
Another Italian accessory that was an ancestor of our handbags, and was very fashionable in fifteenth century Venice (and again in seventeenth century France), was the manicotti, the muff. Usually of a cylindrical shape, in fabric lined with fur, it was used to keep hands and arms warm and had internal pockets where you could keep small objects and money.
In the following period, up until the second half of the eighteenth century, bags were no longer used much, but after the French Revolution came the first examples of bags to be worn on the arm called barilotti, looking a bit like the Italian manicotti of fifteenth century Venice, but bigger, though they weren’t very widespread.
From the end of the nineteenth century the handbag’s attraction was re-discovered and since then it has been in constant use up until today. This was the colonial era and bags in some cases became actual baggage, in other cases they were comfortable and capacious promenade handbags, in leather or fabric, richly decorated and very elegant.
Everything reached a new turning point after the First World War. Pochettes were born as well as the new Italian fashion houses. Thanks to names like Gucci and Gherardini the Italian bag industry continued to expand, finding new forms and materials. Bags started to be matched with other accessories, designed for particular occasions and times of day, and the muff even came back into fashion in velvet or pony-skin. The Italian artisans continued to hand down the secret of making Italian handbags from father to son.
And it was in Italy in the face of the shortages of materials after the Second World War that the fashion evolved for bags made of imitation alternatives to precious materials: imitation leather, dentice (a type of sea bream) was used instead of crocodile, rospo (toad) instead of ostrich. Hemp, linen and silk were also much used.
Despite the fact that it was Paris that became the center of the fashion world after the Second World War, the Italian artisan traditions, handed down and improved over the centuries, continued to flourish and prosper: in Italy and the rest of the world, Italian handbags were in great demand and the more technology and transport evolved the more people had access to Italian bags and fell in love with them. Belts, buckles and pockets came into fashion and reptile skins gained ground, alongside calfskin, in which the Italian master leatherworkers were already more than specialized, and Italian bags became among the most renowned in high fashion.
Today as ever the Italian artisan traditions in the leather bag sector are alive and well and still loyal to the age old traditions that this craft demands. The secrets that make Italian handbags unique and unbeatable have been handed down (and continue to be handed down) from father to son, one generation to the next and so we can still enjoy their wonderful skills today.
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