How Benedetta Bruzziches dreams up her sensational bags

In July 2023, Vogue proclaimed that Sarah Jessica Parker—long associated with Fendi’s iconic Baguette bag—was straying from her favourite. Despite owning one of the most envious Baguette collections of all time, the Sex and the City star was spotted carrying a ’90s-style rectangular crystal mesh bag that wasn’t from the Roman maison. It turned out, the purse she had been photographed sporting on several occasions was the Vitty by Italian label Benedetta Bruzziches.

Bruzziches—whose fanciful creations are favoured by party girls all over the world including celebrities Margot Robbie, Hailey Bieber, and Winnie Harlow—wasn’t always an accessory designer. At 23, while she was designing garments, a chance encounter with an Indian entrepreneur in an elevator during a leather trade show in Italy brought her to India. “I had never made bags before that moment, but I wanted to move to India because I had been there on a school trip and loved it. I went back home and said to my mother, ‘Mom, I’m going to India to work for a guy I met in an elevator.’ She thought I was crazy,” she recalls. But after a quick background check, a young, ambitious Bruzziches packed her suitcases and moved to Tamil Nadu, where she learned how to design and create leather bags for a brand called Calonge. “I learned the job sitting on the floor with women who spoke only Tamil. It was magical—because we could communicate despite not speaking the same language. One of them, Usha, is one of my greatest friends. She doesn’t speak one word of English, but we keep calling each other and laughing on the phone!”

On her return to Italy, she started her eponymous brand with a mission to create whimsical bags that couldn’t be found elsewhere at the time. Inspiration for her designs, she says, comes from within. “My best friend Barbara says that I use the bags as a form of therapy because they help me exercise what I feel inside. I think it’s also helped me build a connection with the women who buy my bags, who may feel the same way or have been through similar experiences,” she says. Designing, for her, is a release, a paradise, and her happy place.

Take, for example, the diaphanous Ariel clutch, which mimics a bubble of oxygen rising in the deep sea. Sculpted from a block of methacrylate and accented with a brass handle set with Swarovski crystals, the design literally came to Bruzziches in a dream, which she sketched upon waking. Another, the Carmen—a cushion bag that feels like a warm hug in fragile moments—was inspired by heartbreak. While her design process is deeply personal and rooted in her life experiences, her creations have global appeal. So much so that their rising popularity has led to copycat designs flooding the market. “Everyone says I should feel proud, but the reality is that it’s very damaging for a small brand to be copied this way. From Zara to Mango, you can find dupes even when you search for our website,” she says. To address the issue, Bruzziches has started a repair service, allowing customers to send in their beloved bags for restoration. “Small brands are disappearing in Italy and soon, we’ll face a major problem with creativity. It’s very difficult for an independent brand like ours, which isn’t a powerhouse like Louis Vuitton, to fight this. I think we need to make customers aware of the situation and help them understand why it’s important to buy the real thing.”

Bruzziches is guided by family: she runs the business with her brother, Agostino, who serves as CEO. When they launched the brand in 2009 in the hills of Caprarola—a small Italian town with fewer than 6,000 residents—they engaged the local community of artisans who had previously created accessories for brands like Armani and Prada until production was outsourced. “We rewired the production model so that the artisans could work from home and still care for their babies and families while being productive and independent,” she explains. The arrival of her son, Mario, has reinvigorated her creativity. “You might think that having children means you’ll have less time, but you’re actually able to do a lot more in the same time than you could before,” she says. The two are inseparable—both figuratively and literally—as little Mario tags along with his mamma everywhere, even to Mumbai for this year’s edition of The Wedding Collective.

So far, Bruzziches has created decadent bags that customers typically reserve for special occasions, but with her latest drop, she’s leaning into utilitarianism and something more suited for the everyday—a reflection of where she is in her own life, juggling roles as a designer, entrepreneur, and mother. The Serena tote, a sleek leather shopper, was born out of the need for a functional ally for the modern woman on the go. Bruzziches names all her bags after characters or women who inspire her, and speaks of them as if they are people, and not inanimate objects. “She’s helping me be more organised, faster, more practical. I am dramatically not a practical person, so she’s giving me this character, and this is the power of these objects.”