The mountain behind the Tobkal bag

Toubkal is the highest peak in North Africa, in the High Atlas, south of Marrakech. On a clear winter day you can see it from a long way off, and what you see first is not detail. It is a shape.

That is the whole idea behind the bag that carries its name.

A silhouette that reads from a distance

The Tobkal is built on a triangular silhouette, wide at the base and narrowing towards the top. It is an unusual shape for a bag, because it refuses the soft rectangle most bags settle into, and it holds its structure rather than slumping when you put it down.

The single circular cut-out serves as the handle. There is no hardware, no clasp, no buckle, nothing screwed on. The hole is the handle, which means the thing you grip is the leather itself.

Why architecture rather than decoration

We learned something about this the evening our campaign played on the screen facade at EP7 in Paris, several storeys high. At that scale, detail disappears. Only structure survives.

The shapes stayed legible, and that told us the visual language holds up because it is built on clear geometry and saturated colour rather than on fine detail. A bag designed that way also works at the other extreme, seen across a room rather than across a street.

One shape, many colours

Because the form is fixed and confident, colour can do the rest of the work. The Tobkal exists in blush pink, hot pink, teal, green, blue, olive, red patent and black patent, and each one changes the character of the bag completely without changing a single line of it.

Each is cut from upcycled leather, so the exact tone of any given bag is its own. Two teals are close relatives, not twins.

How it is worn

The adjustable strap means it works over the shoulder or carried by the cut-out, which is the reason the shape survives both a working day and an evening.

The full run is in the Tobkal collection, and the rest of the leather work sits in shoulder bags.