AnOther Loves: A Duffle With Baggage

The new Gucci Essence Classic duffle packs more than a century of luggage history into one capacious bag

Here’s a real tear-jerker: right now, some of the best-dressed people in the world are separated from the vast majority of their clothes. Fashion month has already rattled through New York and London, is now camped out in Milan and will shortly make its final descent on Paris. Which presents one of luxury’s more ridiculous logistical problems: how exactly do you fit four cities, several climates and a month’s worth of outfits into a suitcase? Gucci’s answer might be a duffle bag, which, historically speaking, is rather neat. In 1897, a teenage Guccio Gucci left Florence for London and found work as a porter at The Savoy, where he encountered the trunks and cases of its wealthy international clientele. The hotel itself was then a marvel of modern luxury. Its scarlet ‘ascending room’, London’s first electric lift, took around seven minutes to make its journey to the upper floors (ample time for an observant porter to inspect a very good suitcase). The young Gucci returned to Florence and, in 1921, opened the luggage atelier that would become the house we know today. Travel has been embedded in its vocabulary ever since. A century later, Demna is mining that vocabulary again and under his direction, the archive is a compost heap where old codes go in, and something newly pungent comes out. In this case – pun unavoidable – that means the GG monogram turned up across this duffle, a softly structured coated-canvas bag designed for ‘life on the move’. As for the name, it’s comically literal: the Gucci Essence Classic – the essence of Gucci, reduced to one capacious object. A hundred and five years after Guccio opened his Florence shop, and nearly 130 after he first handled other people’s luggage at The Savoy, Gucci has ended up back where it began. But now the porter’s bag has the monogram on it.

The Gucci Essence Classic bag is available to shop here.