FASHION Magazine

By Amy Verner

Let’s just call this an exercise of hide and go chic.

It’s mid-October, and in a lacklustre second-floor room with interior windows overlooking the buzzing factory floor below, the Roots head design team has assembled to begin brainstorming for its next It bag.

It bags are rooted in the popular zeitgeist. Hermès’ coveted Kelly and Birkin, for instance, were named after Grace Kelly and actress/singer Jane Birkin. And from Marc Jacobs’ Stam bag to Luella’s Daria, models make for lovely muses, too. Also, consider the Fendi Baguette and its offspring, the Croissant, created by third-generation Fendi Silvia Venturini in the late ’90s. Even doctors, spies, bowlers and hobos have had their accessories co-opted into fashion phenomena.

And so the challenge for Roots, to produce a purse that is both authentic to the brand and of the moment, would seem especially daunting. The company has, however, already achieved some handbag hall of famers. Last year, the Emily—a compact bag with two zipped pockets, a buckled flap, a snug shoulder strap and double-tassel flourishes—proved a smash hit. Unlike bags named after the company’s friends and family, such as the perennially popular Sophie (named after Roots co-founder Don Green’s daughter), Emily was a construct. It was a reflection of the ideal customer: fun and down-to-earth yet in tune with the trends. Mere months later, the debut of the Editor’s Bag—a combination work/leisure tote inspired by what fashion industry types lugged around to runway shows each season—proved just as successful.

With a family tree of totes stacked along the back wall, the team—chief architect Diane Bald and Roots Yoga director Denyse Green (also the wives of company co-founders Michael Budman and Don Green, respectively), director of leather and product development Karl Kowalewski and, lending her expertise, FASHION’s own Susie Sheffman—is trying to identify the elements that will inspire the vision for Spring 2006.

Every Roots bag is the product of a Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest struggle, in which only the most favoured features—gleaned through feedback, sales and editorial coverage—make it into future collections. This means that new iterations bear a faint resemblance to older styles, minus the kinks. And since every handbag is manufactured in this 65,000-square-foot, 180-employee production facility just 30 minutes outside of downtown Toronto, prototypes can be assembled on a whim and assessed within hours.

Green points to the Editor’s Bag and says that its shape is a modification of the company’s classic doctor’s bag. Sheffman pulls out various knapsacks to consider reinterpreting. Bald refers to the Emily as a starting point for the yet-to-be-determined design.

This much is certain: “This spring, it’s not a colour story so much as a natural-texture story,” says Sheffman, who lists linen and canvas as fabrics that are just as likely to play a role in the collection as the signature Prince leather (that soft, grainy one) and bison (very grainy and slightly waxy). Many of the skins come from a 100-year-old tannery in Santa Croce, Italy, that also supplies Prada, Gucci and Chloé. Of course, Roots keeps its name close to its chest.

One of the biggest stories for Roots this spring is the vegetable-tanned leather. Much more than a provocative marketing ploy, the name refers to the chrome-free vegetable tanning process that requires 45 days, as opposed to the typical week for conventional tanning. This gives new meaning to the notion of “genuine leather,” with its purity ushering forth a new level of luxury, akin to the cachet of shopping organic. To drive this point home, Kowalewski says that each bag will come with a certificate of authenticity to explain its origin.

“I like to call them beauty marks,” he says, displaying an assortment of samples, all in various shades of brown, with such tantalizing names as cinnamon, hazelnut and ecru. “It has an incredible feel and character. Each skin is different from the next, and every bag looks unique.”

What has the team especially buzzed is the Washed Naked, where the leather has, quite literally, been rinsed and hung out to dry, giving it that well-worn patina and featherweight feel. It’s a take on the company’s Naked leather, which debuted last summer and has no finishes or oils.

With the orders placed but yet to be delivered, the team concludes this first meeting by agreeing to wait for the sides, or half-hides generally measuring 20 to 22 square feet, to arrive before committing to a single design. The process seems justifiably stalled.

So it comes as a surprise that on December 6, the day of a spring preview for the media at the flagship Bloor Street store in Toronto, there is a bag—placed front and centre on a podium—that has everyone drooling. Tentatively called the South Beach, it’s a departure in almost every way, simultaneously combining jetset extravagance with undertones of day-to-day durability. It glows in all its white leather and gold hardware glory.

It belongs in a boutique hotel lobby; it is stunning.

When FASHION revisits the factory a few weeks later, Bald seems pleased with the enthusiastic response, especially since the team was unsure about making its first foray into gold. “We did it in silver, but it didn’t have oomph. It didn’t pop,” she declares.

The other big difference is that this bag makes its impact with height rather than width. It’s the basic knapsack template, with a wider bottom so that it can stand on its own. Plus, it has two oversized handles and a cotton webbing strap. “We wanted a fresh shape,” says Green.

“There have been a lot of horizontal bags, but the north-south [vertical] bags are looking newer,” adds Sheffman.

The team’s final verdict? “We thought it looked great. We won’t go forward and do it in every store but for our top five or 10 stores,” Bald decides. “There’s a story with it. It’s a little more unique, and there will be a limited edition of them.”

No doubt because the South Beach will take longer to produce. Kowalewski’s brother Richard, the director of plant operations, is on hand and jokes that a half-hour should be factored in to the assembly time just for washing up before handling the white leather. He figures each bag will require three hours, versus two for a standard Emily.

They realize that the exclusivity of the South Beach must be balanced by a collection of spring bags that are more affordable. On attending the photoshoot for the South Beach in mid-January, it appears that these designs have been finalized. Back at the factory amid the whirring clamour of sewing machines, an assortment of new bags gets positioned atop layers of uncut hides. One is the Safari, a tote that comes in either linen and leather or Africa leather (read: dark, rich). The Heather, a soft-sided shoulder bag that’s great for travelling, is another. Green arrives carrying an even newer style, the Heidi, whose oval closure could best be described as Roots’ take on some of the in-demand Mulberry bags.

Which raises the issue that many purse purists have long had with Roots, an issue that will be a determining factor in the South Beach’s success: mainly, that the company is always reinterpreting other brands’ bags du jour.

“I think that when you’re in the fashion business and doing leather bags, you always have to look and see what people are doing, because there are definite trends and moods and feelings that are being shown,” says Bald. “But then our question is, Is it Roots? How can we Roots-ify it?”

And that’s why the South Beach is practically guaranteed to be a hot accessory. For the first time, a Roots bag looks like neither anything the company has done before nor anything else out there.

Sheffman calls it a “statement bag,” and as any seasoned shopper knows, statements don’t come cheap. But ringing in at $430 for the vegetable-tanned leather (other options will eventually be available), the price could be far worse. “The quality is as incredible as any bag people would pay $1,500 for,” she says.

And for those who may feel that Roots is gilding a leather lily, it’s more that this has become the necessary upshot of staying in the game. After all, with the Bloor Street store flexing its muscles across the street from Louis Vuitton, Chanel, Prada and Hermès, the Roots team understands that producing an It bag can still be second nature, so long as it incorporates a little flash.

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