“The bag, it carries your things and carries your secrets,” Priscila Alexandre Spring said. The 43-year-old creative director of leather goods at Hermès sat in her office in Pantin, just outside of Paris, explaining what she liked about designing bags — in particular, the relationship between “your private life and your exterior life.”
Ms. Alexandre Spring joined the Hermès leather goods métier in 2015, and in 2020 she was appointed to her current role. Hermès, which began in 1837 as a saddle maker, is a name that comes with intimations of money (bags often sell for more than $10,000), scarcity (if you can get your hands on one) and craftsmanship (each is handmade by a single craftsperson). Most people have heard of the Kelly bag (named for Grace Kelly) or the Birkin (named for Jane Birkin) and the myriad celebrities who tote them.
It is Ms. Alexandre Spring’s job to make the next big one.
Born in Canada, Ms. Alexandre Spring grew up in the south of Portugal. Her Portuguese father and Mozambican mother were both teachers who wanted their daughter to be curious about the world and have a classic education. She learned five languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian) and studied piano, flute, violin and ballet.
At 13, she switched to basketball, which she played until she was 25. “Maybe this is why, for me, it’s really important to work within a team,” Ms. Alexandre Spring said. She keeps an Hermès baseball glove in her office alongside stacks of art books — “Margiela: Les Années Hermès,” Jamel Shabazz’s “A Time Before Crack.”
She studied fashion design at the Lisbon School of Architecture, then moved to Paris and bounced around design houses, working first for the Portuguese designer Felipe Oliveira Baptista, then designing men’s ready-to-wear for Louis Vuitton, then as an accessory stylist for Balenciaga. She moved to New York in 2008 to join Proenza Schouler.
In New York, she lived mostly in the East Village and freelanced, designing shoes for Marc by Marc Jacobs. “Downtown New York, it’s like a small town,” she said. Soon enough, she ran into Humberto Leon and Carol Lim of the erstwhile cool-kids boutique Opening Ceremony, who hired her in 2010.
When Mr. Leon and Ms. Lim became the designers of Kenzo, Ms. Alexandre Spring joined them in Paris as an accessory stylist, splitting her life between France and the United States, 15 days at a time. After a year of back and forth, she moved back to Paris full time.
Ms. Alexandre Spring, who lives with her American husband and two children in the Marais, likens the design process to a pingpong game: a dialogue between her fellow designers and artisans. As a first step, she’ll do a sketch, which she then takes to prototype makers, whose workshop is just a few steps away. They discuss size, functionality, even things like the sound the hardware makes when the bag closes.
For the Arçon bag, Ms. Alexandre Spring was inspired by the shape of the flap of a saddle. But then another inspiration came to her, she said.
“I was looking at a book that was talking about pockets in the 19th century, how men had about seven pockets in their jackets, pockets in their vests and pockets in their pants, and women could have only one pocket that they had to hide under their skirt. And that was kind of the beginning of emancipation of women. When skirts became smaller and tighter to the body, they just took the pocket up from under the skirt and put it outside.”
“So that’s how this pocket came here,” she said, pointing to an angled zip pocket, reminiscent of a slash pocket on a skirt or trousers, on a chocolate brown Arçon. A hook was added for keys or gloves.
Another bag Ms. Alexandre Spring designed, the Petite Course, which means a little errand in French or a little ride, was smaller, more ergonomic — “for a sports car,” she said. “You put your wallet and your keys in it and you go.
Once Ms. Alexandre Spring and her team are satisfied with a design, they make it out of salpa, a material that is similar to leather, a process she compares to Frankenstein’s monster. “We make them small, we make them big,” she said.
The bag is then produced in one of 22 Hermès leather workshops in France. Among them is Maroquinerie Saint Antoine, a workshop in the 12th arrondissement of Paris, where more than 100 apron-clad employees assemble bags. They are mostly longtime craftspeople but include a class of about a dozen trainees whose prior careers included barmaid, sheep breeder and bus driver.
Among moments of office whimsy (bowls of candy and party photos pasted to the desks), there is the occasional crocodile Birkin or a Haut à Courroies made of Volynka leather salvaged from a 1786 shipwreck, which gave the space a pungent, smoky beef jerky scent.
When asked about designs on the horizon, Ms. Alexandre Spring demurred. In one corner of a workshop was a decades-old doctor bag she took from the Hermès archives for inspiration. Elsewhere in the workshop, ropes were coiled on a table.
“Everything is a work in progress,” she said. “But, yeah, we’re trying a new thing with ropes, but we don’t know if it’s going to work.” It can take between six months and six years to create a new design.
Her team produces 10 new bags each season for the men’s and women’s collections, which, according to Ms. Alexandre Spring, “is not a lot compared to places where you can have collections of 30 new bags.”
“But sometimes,” she said, “I can think of 10 bags a day.”