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The Dior Saddle Bag, with Alexander Fury.

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There’s always something fascinating about how and why a particular fashion proves resonant - although in retrospect its easy to unpick the socioeconomic headwinds that may have given it impetus, it still proves impossible to predict. Who knew the ‘New Look’ would change fashion in 1947? Certainly not the department store buyers who had left Paris via cruise-ship to New York - and, when docked, had to turn around and travel right back to Paris, because fashion had shifted. 

Those kind of seismic shifts happen less and less these days - but you do kind of see it in accessories, when certain styles can ignite urgent, even frenzied acquisition. Dior’s Saddle Bag, introduced in 1999, is one of the ones I remember best - the first ‘It Bag’ of the twenty-first century.

The Saddle was proposed in Galliano’s Spring/Summer 2000 collection, inspired by a fusion of Lauryn Hill’s style and equestrianism, drawn in part from an English hunting theme evident in Galliano’s winter 1999 ‘Matrix’ Haute Couture show. Dior himself was no great horseman but his house’s backer, cotton king Marcel Boussac - the Bernard Arnault of his day - was a keen horseman. The name is obvious - the kidney-shaped bag looks like a flat, sketched-out saddle slung under your armpit, thumb thrust through the ‘stirrup’ dangling beneath the body. 

The Saddle wasn’t entirely new: it was a reaction to the prevalent accessory mood of that late-Nineties moment, the phenomenal success of the Fendi Baguette and its snug underarm positioning that, possibly, forever changed the way women could wear their bags. Fashion rivals scrambled to propose their own version, including Dior which launched a bag titled ‘Malice,’ a bean-shaped purse suspended by a thin shoulder strap decorated with gilded beads (incidentally, those would later prove the connector between the metal ‘C’ and ‘D’ on the Saddle’s handle). That was moderately successful, but no great breakthrough. 

The original show featured hardware straight from the tack shop - it was only later than the dangling bits and bridles were refined and reconfigured, wittily, into ‘C’ and ‘D’, emblazoned across a sexually provocative campaign photographed by Nick Knight. The first ones were proposed in hues to match the collection - creamy tan leather, plain and logo-jacquard denim - itself revived from a design originally debuted by Marc Bohan in 1969 - and swirly equestrian scarf prints that owe a debt to Hermès. Perhaps too close a debt, given that they were discontinued after a single season. But those make collecting early Saddle bags easy - the first generation feature those printed silks as linings.

The bag, somehow, hit a nerve - without marketing campaigns or influencer roll-out, the Saddle Bag became a thoroughbred champion. It was perhaps most memorably featured on Sex and the City, where Sarah Jessica Parker carried every show iteration.

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Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) wearing Dior Saddle Bag in the series "Sex and the City"

By the following season, Dior was already expanding to other styles (double Saddles, Saddle bowling-bags), while the revived ‘Oblique’ logo-jacquard had become a twenty-first century house staple. The Saddle was the first bona fide hit Dior bag since the Lady Dior - incidentally, when first introduced in 1994, it was called Chouchou, only rechristened after an example was given to Diana, Princess of Wales by Bernadette Chirac in 1995. That was also when the bag first took off - in the same way that the Saddle exploded after SJP’s endorsement.

The Saddle naturally petered out after a few years, when mid-aughts fashion changed. But Dior’s current artistic director Maria Grazia Chiuri revived both the logo and the bag in 2018 - it had already begun to be picked up second hand, by women often too young to remember it first time around, but who had seen it in Sex and fancied a jolt of pure nostalgia in their wardrobe. Chiuri reinterpreted the original, plainly visible when the two are juxtaposed - the new hardware is heavier and chunkier, in burnished brass rather than the original glossy gold. The ‘Malice’ connector has vanished; the bags feel a little sturdier, and come with cross-body straps. It shows how a hit can be reborn. Kim Jones did even more work when he redesigned the Saddle for Dior’s menswear line, reshaping the saddle into a minimal silhouette with industrial buckle that has subsequently been worn by both men and women, and spawned a new line of men’s leathergoods.

I have some of Kim Jones’ evolved Dior Saddle bags - and they’re great, I use them. Yet for me, there will always be a true nostalgia hit for the originals. They’re a great bag - even though they are wildly impractical. The silhouette is ludicrously slender, the kidney shape impossibly to fit half your junk into (these were, of course, pre-iPhone - but you can’t fit an old-fashioned pad and pen in there either). But there’s something about them that chimes with me - I love the musical clinking of the gold hardware, that you can even hear it on-screen in Sex, if you listen hard enough when Carrie scrabbles in the gutter for a waylaid cigarette. Yes, I’m a mega-fan. And, as with all the best kind of vintage, they manage to conjure up the mood of another time, while also remaining utterly relevant for today.

 

by Alexander Fury

Shop Dior's Saddle Bags

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