About a commanding snap
MOST EXPENSIVE HANDBAGS MADE IN SA, RIVALLING VUITTON OR HERMES Each week Marie-Lais looks out for the unusual, the unique, the downright quirky or just something or someone we might have had no idea about, even though we live here. We like to travel our
As I think cars are for ferrying people, I think handbags are for carrying stuff without too much inconvenience or ugliness. A capacious canvas or straw bag usually does the job. A capacious cerise ostrich or emerald crocodile or splashdyed python skin handbag does not look horrible or impractical by any means. However, I could travel around the world or carry stuff in it.
These are the most expensive handbags made in our country, rivalling Vuitton or Hermes for handmade, exquisite quality, maybe at a tenth of their prices. The levels of perfection are the same.
Via La Moda doesn’t advertise or market on their magnificent scale and also doesn’t want to have to make more very time-consuming handbags than it exports and sells here anyhow. Each bag takes 48 hours of skill to complete, when most cars take four hours.
Hanspeter Winkelmeyr, master craftsman and designer, furls a crocodile skin into its former shape when it was still a saurian whipper and snapper.
It’s an even odder moment when he does the same with an ostrich skin. From all three kinds of skins, dangle certificates of their farmed provenance.
With few exceptions, Via la Moda’s bags are made of what they call exotics. These skins arrive ready-dyed and, in theory, ready to use for bag making.
In practice, a lot more happens here in this exceptionally attractive factory to create the ultimate arm candy. Heather and I go right through the neat process.
In the eye-popping showroom, the manageress asks me not to touch the bags because I’ve been writing with a pen. So, not I but someone else has opened one of the colour- and skin-coded wealth of handbags and shut it.
My ears get it. It’s not a click. It’s a commanding snap. I guess it’s that sound of extreme-quality materials and professionalism, maybe like the door of a Lamborghini snapping shut. I reckon that, in a crowd of so-so handbags, one of these shutting anywhere in the world must generate instant envy.
I am now carrying a new, malva-pink ostrich-skin keyring among the stuff in my floral canvas bag.
Via la Moda: 19 Banfield Rd, Industria North. See for the anticipated November sale.