Behind the Scenes With a Celine Bag Master

The Triomphe bag is an unmistakable signature of the modern Celine era. The purse debuted in 2018 under the house’s former creative director Hedi Slimane. Blending the brand’s history with the excellence of its technical craftsmanship, the seemingly simple crossbody has quickly become inextricable from the house codes.

The Triomphe may be subtle, sleek, and small in size, but it possesses much more than meets the eye. This week, the brand invited ELLE.com into the Soho flagship store in New York City to get a behind-the-scenes look at how the bag gets made, directly from the hands of an in-house expert artisan.

To trace the history of the bag, you must begin with the happy accident that brought about Celine’s now-iconic logo design, and the centerpiece clasp of the Triomphe. As the story goes, on an afternoon in 1971, founder Céline Vipiana was driving on the Place de l’Étoile in Paris when her car broke down. As she overlooked the Arc de Triomphe, she noticed that the chain links surrounding the monument all bore interlocking C symbols. Vipiana was enthralled with the emblem and immediately reached out to the city of Paris for permission to use an adapted version for her brand’s logo. From there, the importance of the Triomphe-inspired clasp was cemented in the house’s history.

Beyond the logo, the bag is crafted entirely with the finest, hand-selected first-grade leather sourced from Tuscan tanneries and certified by the Leather Working Group. Craftspeople meticulously inspect each sheath, measuring its thickness and consistency, before beginning construction. During the presentation, Celine’s in-house expert demonstrated the processes of cutting, molding, gluing, and hand-stitching that went into key elements of the bag including the crossbody strap, front flap, and interior accordion folds. In all, the bag is composed of 89 individual pieces of leather, and over 100 total pieces, if you count additional hardware components. The artisan who demonstrated for us was one of the elite few who could construct every element of the Triomphe from start to finish, a process that can take up to three weeks. (However, the bag is usually crafted by multiple artisans who are trained in highly specific aspects of the design.)

The Triomphe is available in a wide range of colors, including mauve, mint green, and canvas, but the icons remain the stark ink black and tan, which is the only color made in entirely natural and delicate unfinished calf leather. Watching steady hands navigate the softness of the raw materials without so much as a scratch or a wrinkle, there was no doubt that we were watching a master at work.