CHANEL Vintage Single Flap Matelasse Black Lambskin GHW 14XXX73

Why We Love: The Chanel Vintage Single Flap in Black Lambskin

February 1955, and the Bag That Gave Women Their Hands Back

The story starts with a complaint. Gabrielle Chanel was tired of holding her handbag. Clutches demanded a hand, and a hand that is holding something cannot light a cigarette, cannot gesture, cannot do anything else. So in February of 1955 she put a chain on a quilted rectangle and released it to the world, and the 2.55 took its name from the month and year of its birth. Everything about it came from her own life. The quilting is said to echo the jackets of stable hands at the racecourses she frequented, the burgundy lining the uniform of her convent school, the chain the keys the nuns wore at their waists. It is the rarest kind of design, one that solves a practical problem and carries a biography at the same time. Seventy years on, almost every shoulder bag made is arguing with it or agreeing with it.

The Single Flap, and Why the Vintage Ones Feel Different

When Karl Lagerfeld took the house in 1983 he did something quietly audacious. He put the interlocking CC turnlock on the front, where Coco had used a plain rectangular clasp, and in doing so created the silhouette most people now picture when they hear the word Chanel. The bags of this period, made through the late 1980s and into the early 1990s, have a character that later production does not repeat. The hardware was plated to a standard Chanel specified as 24 karat, which is why it ages to a warm, slightly softened gold rather than the brighter finish of modern pieces. The single flap construction, with one flap rather than two, makes the bag lighter in the hand and roomier inside, and many collectors quietly prefer it for exactly that reason. It is the purer, more usable object.

Lambskin, and the Bargain It Asks You to Make

Caviar leather is sensible. Lambskin is beautiful. There is no getting around the trade-off, and anyone selling you a vintage lambskin flap should say so plainly. Run a hand over it and you understand immediately what the fuss is about. It has a give and a warmth that pressed caviar cannot approach, a faint sheen that pools in the diamonds of the quilting and catches light as the bag moves. It is the finish that makes the matelassé read as sculpture rather than pattern. The price is that lambskin remembers everything. It creases where it has been folded, scratches where it has met a table edge, and softens over the years into something that hangs rather than stands. On a bag of this age those marks are not a flaw in the object. They are the object doing exactly what lambskin does, and a thirty-five-year-old lambskin flap with no creasing at all would be a bag nobody ever loved.

What Thirty-Five Years Looks Like

This one has clearly been used, and we would rather say that than dress it up. The lambskin carries creasing and scratching, the hardware has taken hairline marks, the interior pocket shows a little tearing at the edge, and the whole piece arrives with the faint scent of long storage. All of it is disclosed in full in the condition description. What it also has is an intact body, well defined quilting, a clean interior and its matching leather pouch, which is the piece most often lost in three decades of ownership and the detail a serious collector will notice first. Vintage Chanel is bought for what it is, not for what it might have been. This is a bag with thirty-five years behind it and a great many ahead, and the marks on it are simply the first half of the story.

Wearing It Now

The extraordinary thing about a vintage flap is how little effort it requires. It goes over a black coat in winter and over a linen dress in February without ever feeling like a decision. Worn long it is casual, doubled up it is formal, and in both cases it does the work of a piece of jewellery. There is also a satisfaction specific to vintage that a boutique purchase cannot provide. Everyone knows roughly what a new one costs. Almost nobody can date a bag by looking at it, which means the person carrying a 1989 flap knows something about it that the room does not, and there are few better definitions of style than that.

Visit us at 75 King St, Sydney CBD to see this vintage flap in person, or send us a DM at @luxe_again_maison to make it yours.