"A Bag Should Feel Like a Jewel": Mary Katrantzou Makes the Case with Bulgari's First Minaudieres Collection

"The House recently unveiled its first-ever collection of minaudières as a dedicated evening accessories line. Not evening bags in any conventional sense, but conceived as "collector's pieces" by Mary Katrantzou, creative director of leather goods and accessories. You could say they sit somewhere between jewel and object, ornament and artefact. Katrantzou, whose design language has long fused architecture with embellishment, approached the project as an exploration of boundaries."

""I wanted to explore where a jewel becomes a bag, and where a bag feels like a jewel in your hand," she tells Elite Traveler. Ceremonial by nature and intimate in scale, the minaudière offered the perfect form through which to investigate that concept. "This moment felt natural," Katrantzou says. "Our accessories have reached a level of maturity where we can fully express Bulgari's symbolic language. Function can step back and meaning can lead.""

Bulgari unveiled its first dedicated minaudières as a distinct evening accessories line conceived as collector's pieces rather than conventional evening bags. Mary Katrantzou approached the project to blur the boundary between jewel and bag, using intimate, ceremonial forms to prioritize meaning over function. The collection distills Bulgari's signature motifs—Serpenti, Monete, Tubogas, Divas' Dream and Bulgari Bulgari—into objects of evening refinement. The motifs carry historical and symbolic narratives, with Tubogas proving particularly challenging to reinterpret. The resulting pieces occupy a space between ornament and artefact, expressing the House's symbolic language.

Read at Elite Traveler