From the first prototype to WHITE Milano

It was 2014. Behind me were months of discarded prototypes and one thing that finally worked: the oval frame that holds the cameo and lets you change it in ten seconds.

I knew it worked. I didn't know whether it mattered to anyone but me.

The gamble: WHITE Milano

I wasn't looking for just any showcase. I was aiming at WHITE, which is where international buyers go to find contemporary fashion before it reaches the shops. I applied for the space for emerging designers, and I was selected.

I arrived with three bags: Zoje, Bavoll, Maraveja. Bolognese names, and a material nobody used for bags — cellulose fibre, no leather. The interchangeable cameo was already there, from day one.

The click

Setting up a space with your own surname above it, the first time, is something that stays with you. But what I remember best happened afterwards, when the doors opened.

Buyers walk past thousands of bags in three days: they look, they touch, they move on. At our stand they stopped, pulled the frame, heard the three clicks, and put it back. Then they did it a second time.

It wasn't the material that stopped them. It was the fact that the bag changed in their hands.

Going back to Bologna

I came back from that fair with the first orders and with something I hadn't had before: proof that the idea held up outside my workshop.

The following year the Night was born, the first one in leather, and I opened the shop in Via d'Azeglio. The first orders from outside Italy would come in 2018, from Russia and the United States.

But the frame those buyers pulled in 2014 is the same one as today. The size has never changed.