LA.I.PE SpA is the Italian manufacturing house behind some of the industry's most exacting names — Vivienne Westwood, Valextra, Berluti. From 2017 to 2019, across four seasons, I designed for Cromia — a house identified, in its own words, by the richness and opulence of its collections, with metal fittings that characterize and differentiate the numerous lines of each season.
That made hardware the heart of the work. I originated silhouettes from a blank page and engineered the metalwork that set each line apart, carrying both from the first pencil line to the final plated clasp. Not styling, and not a contribution to someone else's concept — full authorship, shape and hardware, at the standard of a house trusted by those names.
The Cromia codes were built to travel. The Uptown bag's round handle is the evolution of the Cromia "C"; its centered macro-stud closure descends from the IT bag — the same detail that became Precious. Shape, hardware, and monogram were developed as a system, not one-off bags.
Across four seasons I originated the lines that carried Cromia — each from concept and silhouette through print and hardware. These became the recognizable codes of the house.
Two signature closures anchored the collections. The Square Gold Lock — a geometric, refined lock built to give clean shapes character, used across finishes through FW19 and SS20 — and the Square Dog Hock, a square carabiner with a new open-and-close mechanism engineered to make shoulder bags secure to wear. Both taken from dimensioned CAD through hand study to plated brass.
Pieces from these collections reached the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival, produced to the standard of a house trusted by Vivienne Westwood, Valextra, and Berluti. Two years of designing at that bar built the technical fluency — silhouette, hardware, and production — that underpins every project the studio takes on today.