Photo: Matteo Carassale/matteo Carassale
Most luxury bags are designed to carry everything: a phone, a charger, three lip liners, and at least one emergency hand cream. Mary Katrantzou, the designer known for her kaleidoscopic prints and now the creative director of leather-goods and accessories at Bulgari, went the opposite direction. Her first campaign for the house centers on jewel-like minaudières (which are basically vanity cases) that don’t fit a phone at all. And she’s clear it’s not an accident. That’s the point. These are bags that force a choice not between a wallet and a compact, but between convenience and meaning.
Instead of asking the bag to hold more, Katrantzou asked it to say more. Each minaudière comes with its own tiny book tucked inside, custom-made to fit its exact shape so it feels designed in, not dropped in. The five women behind the words — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Kim Ji-won, Isabella Rossellini, Linda Evangelista, and Sumayya Vally — aren’t just faces in a campaign. Katrantzou treats them like co-authors, with each distilling something personal into a few hundred words meant to be found later, reread, passed down, and maybe even brought up at dinner. Katrantzou told me that Adichie, in particular, sparked the whole idea with a line that became the campaign’s spine: “People make culture. Culture doesn’t make people.”
When Katrantzou says she went back to “revisit the archive,” she didn’t stop at Serpenti, the motif most people can clock from ten feet away. She went looking for the rest of Bulgari’s symbol universe. The brand already had that depth in jewelry. She wanted it to land in the bags too.
That’s when the campaign’s big idea clicked into place. The phrase she kept returning to was “carrying culture,” which sounds lofty until you hear how it started. The turning point was giving the vanity case, which she described as “the smallest, first step,” a new kind of functionality, the moment where jewelry starts behaving like an accessory. Once she saw that bridge, the question stopped being aesthetic and became strategic. Is it right to create a collection of minaudières that don’t fit a phone? Her answer didn’t wobble: “I very strongly and boldly believe it’s right for Bulgari.”
The whole thing is, in its own quiet way, a push against the fast-paced lives we’ve normalized, glued to our phones. Last year, when we were on set for the campaign in Rome, Adichie put language to that speed in a way that resonated. “I wish the world extended more patience to women,” she said. “There’s that external pressure, but I think what’s worse is the pressure that we give ourselves.”
Photo Courtesy of Bvlgari shot by Ethan James Green.
Photo Courtesy of Bvlgari shot by Ethan James Green.
Here is a Q&A on the making of the bags.
Minaudières are a very specific choice. What was the first design moment that made this direction feel inevitable?
For me, it was realizing the vanity case could be the bridge. When I started working on these pieces, the vanity mirror felt like the smallest first step toward a new kind of functionality. It’s where the object stops living only in the world of jewelry and starts behaving like an accessory you actually use.
The bags don’t fit a phone, and you’ve said that was deliberate.
I felt very strongly about it. It was a bit of a risk, but it gave birth to the idea of “carrying culture” and to working with five extraordinary women to distill their wisdom into these miniature books.
Was there any pushback?
Yes. When I first presented it, Mira, who leads the leather-goods category, was hesitant. And because I was new, I did question myself for a moment when I felt that resistance. But I wasn’t coming from a place of wanting to be bold for the sake of it. Bulgari’s design DNA and symbolism defined the size, and I could explain why it had to be that way. Bulgari also has this incredible archive of minaudières from the ’50s and ’60s that are so precious, so it felt natural to bring that back and stay true to the house. So yes, I had to stand my ground and convince people, but I had conviction because the form had a reason.
On the technical side, what made these bags so difficult to execute?
My God, it’s taken us nearly a year and a half for a reason. It was about studying the technical specs and understanding proportion and scale. Materiality was just as important. With Divas’ Dream, the semiprecious stones had to be in the same family we would use for our jewelry. With Serpenti, the scales are hand-enameled, like the original materials on the watches from the ’40s and ’50s. It was always about finding that perfect balance so that it feels precious in your hand like jewelry, but it’s still functional as an accessory in a different way.
Photo Courtesy of Bvlgari shot by Matteo Carassale.
Photo Courtesy of Bvlgari shot by Matteo Carassale.
At what point did the bags and the books start to feel like one idea instead of two separate concepts?
At first, the idea of carrying culture was going to live across many bags. Then the collection took shape and we realized minaudières were the perfect form for it. Once we understood that carrying culture could live inside the bag, through these mini-books, everything became much more defined. We edited the project down to the icons, and the women became part of the design language, not an add-on. Now it’s hard for me to even imagine how we weren’t thinking about it from the beginning.
You call them icons, and it’s a specific five. What was the logic of that casting, and why did these women feel like the right voices for this campaign?
That was one of the most interesting parts of the process, because we wanted women in different chapters of their lives and from different decades, since wisdom shifts and evolves. We also wanted different fields, but with something that still connects to lived experience. I feel so fortunate, because all five women were in our casting deck from the very beginning. Some names felt unattainable, and then there was the reality of finding a date where we could manage to have everyone together in Rome, plus the complexity of asking them to write something personal. The mini-books became such a huge part of the campaign that the effort that went into designing the minaudières felt equal to the work of speaking with these women and working with a ghostwriter to help find what was meaningful to each of them, without influencing any direction.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sumayya Vally, and Linda Evangelista Photo Courtesy of Bvlgari shot by Ethan James Green.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Sumayya Vally, and Linda Evangelista Photo Courtesy of Bvlgari shot by Ethan James Green.
What became special is that when you read the books, they start to interconnect without us trying to make that happen. Isabella talks about nature, leaving Hollywood, taking a degree in ethology, and her connection to animals. Linda writes about honoring tradition, her Italian heritage, and passing lineage forward. Chimamanda didn’t know initially what to write, and then one line unlocked everything for her: “People make culture. Culture doesn’t make people.” Sumayya writes about home and home in transit, not as four walls but as emotions, memory, sounds, taste, everything you carry. And Kim, because she’s the youngest, it’s so interesting that she writes about striving for perfection at the beginning of her career, then reaching deeper within and finding inner peace before she can really honor her craft. It was also wonderful to have them meet in Rome and feel the mutual respect in the room, and to see how connected they were in their thoughts and in what they chose to share.
Kim Ji-won and Isabella Rossellini Photo Courtesy of Bvlgari shot by Ethan James Green.
Kim Ji-won and Isabella Rossellini Photo Courtesy of Bvlgari shot by Ethan James Green.
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