Leather Woven
Bags Capture Fashion Market, Panipat Emerges as Production Centre
As
Craig Wright has built his brand, Dragon Diffusion, he has quietly built a reputation
as a leather craftsman for Hermès, Chanel and others. Now he’s ready to talk
about it.
Craig
Wright, the founder of Dragon Diffusion, has become one of the luxury
industry's quietest yet most respected leather craftsmen — known not only for
his own woven leather bags but also for his behind-the-scenes work with iconic
houses like Hermès, Chanel, Dior, Loewe, Louis Vuitton and Bottega Veneta.
Though
his brand has existed for over two decades and has long been considered an if-you-know-you-know label, interest
in Dragon Diffusion has surged recently, especially after fashion insiders and
celebrities like Ashley Olsen popularized the bags, which retail for $400–$600.
Wright,
67, originally from New Zealand with Māori heritage, has worked with
leather since adolescence — from sheepskin tanneries to developing braid-style
belts in the U.S. In 1988, he founded Dragon Diffusion in Belgium, later
partnering with a pioneering leather-weaving engineer, Ivan Kadic, who
introduced him to factories in Chennai, India. Today, Wright owns a majority
stake in a factory in Ranipet, India, where
about 700 weavers and 275 finishing artisans handcraft Dragon Diffusion
bags using traditional weaving methods and vegetable-tanned leather.
The
designs are inspired by global basketry traditions — from Māori kete to banana-leaf baskets from the Mariana Islands and
the cane patterns of Thonet chairs. Wright embraces irregularity, believing
visible craftsmanship makes each piece unique. Since around 2010, each bag
includes a small Saint Christopher medal, which has developed its own
fan following.
Despite
his reputation and luxury partnerships, Wright avoids publicity — once advised
that “the bags will sell themselves.”
But with growing international demand and a shift to e-commerce after the
pandemic, his once-underground brand is now firmly in the fashion spotlight.
Yet, as
Wright says, his favorite design is always “the next one — whether it’s for Dragon or someone else.”
On a cloudy Sunday morning in October,
Craig Wright was at the Tuileries Garden in Paris for Premiere Classe, a
twice-annual accessories trade show held around the time of Paris Fashion Week.
“We don’t really need to do these shows
anymore, but it’s good for people to see us and see what we are up to,” Mr.
Wright said. He was speaking about his brand Dragon Diffusion, which has had a
presence at Premiere Classe for about a quarter-century.
Throughout the trade show, the Dragon
Diffusion stall was visited by buyers from stores around the world, like Hug, a
Chinese boutique with locations in Chengdu, Shenzhen and Aranya, and Halo
Shoes, in Portland, Ore. They had come to see the latest woven-leather bag,
shoe and belt designs developed by Mr. Wright and made by artisan weavers
employed by him in India.
One of the first places to carry Dragon
Diffusion in America was Lost & Found, a store with locations in Los
Angeles and Santa Monica, Calif. Its owner, Jamie Rosenthal, has been selling
the products for two decades. She was “gobsmacked,”
she said, by the number of woven Dragon Diffusion creations she saw out and
about in Paris this year — a phenomenon also observed by local publications
like Le Figaro. “I saw so many girls with the bags in the metro, on the
street,” Ms. Rosenthal said.
The Rosanna bag has a weave similar to
that of Dragon Diffusion’s most popular style, the Santa Croce.
It was an ascendant moment for a brand
that has long had a cult following, thanks partly to its associations with
Ashley Olsen and other discerning people who have carried the bags, which
typically cost between $400 and $600. The model Ella Richards, 29, is among
them. “It’s like Bottega,” Ms. Richards said of the way Dragon Diffusion’s
woven handbags resemble the intrecciato designs from
Bottega Veneta. “I think they’re chicer than Bottega,” she added.
As Ms. Rosenthal put it, Dragon
Diffusion was “if-you-know-you-know for a long time.”
The same could be said for Mr. Wright,
67, who over the years has quietly earned a reputation as a leather goods
whisperer. As he has grown Dragon Diffusion, he has also done leather and
weaving work for various labels: 45R, Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Loewe, Prada
— even Bottega Veneta.
About 60 percent of Mr. Wright’s work is
for brands that are not his own, he said. It’s a reason he doesn’t like to give
interviews, preferring to stay “very much underground,” as he put it.
Another reason Mr. Wright has resisted
giving interviews, he said, was advice he received from Frances Stein, a
fashion editor turned accessories designer for brands including Chanel: “Don’t
spend money on press agents or publicity. The bags will sell themselves.”
Mr. Wright has been working with hides
since adolescence, he said. Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, he was raised in
nearby Kaikoura by his maternal grandmother, who he said was Indigenous
Māori. In his teens and early 20s, he worked the 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. shift
at a local sheepskin tannery, where, he said, he would sometimes snooze on
shearling skins used as material for Ugg boots.
An avid surfer, he spent as much of his
spare time as he could in or near the water. “‘Do you think you’re going to be
sailing and surfing forever?’” Mr. Wright recalled being asked by his father
back then.
Mr. Wright’s daughter, Jane Wright, a
29-year-old designer at Zara Home, said he is still very much a “shy surfer
bro” at heart.
In his mid 20s,
Mr. Wright came to the United States. He found work developing leather goods,
like a braided belt made of a single leather strip. He continued working with
leather, in America and Europe, establishing Dragon Diffusion in Belgium in
1988 — a year that coincided with the lunar calendar’s year of the dragon.
Mr. Wright started Dragon Diffusion in
Belgium after he had found a sort of mentor there in Ivan Kadic, an engineer
who had invented specialized machines for producing woven leather goods. Mr.
Kadic, who died in 2010, brought Mr. Wright to factories in Chennai, India, an
area renowned for its leather industry.
Mr. Wright is now the majority owner of
a factory in Ranipet, India, about a three-hour drive
from Chennai. Called AB Global, it is where Dragon Diffusion bags are made, a
process that involves machinery invented by Mr. Kadic. Mr. Wright, who lives in
Brussels, spends about four months a year in India, he said. He otherwise works
mostly at Dragon Diffusion’s headquarters in Belgium. This summer, the company
moved from a location in Brussels to a much larger space outside the city.
The recent surge of interest in Dragon
Diffusion came years after Mr. Wright started bringing his knowledge of, and
relationships with, Indian leather factories to other European labels, like
Hermès. In the mid-1990s, he helped develop woven place mats for the French
luxury brand, along with the Ahmedabad bag, a machine-woven tote made of
leather and polyester cord.
Corinne Poux-Bernard, who worked at
Hermès from 1992 to 2012, in positions overseeing bag and luggage design, said that
Mr. Wright showed an “ambidexterity” for leather work done both by hand and
with machines.
Vincent du Sartel, who has held design
positions at Loewe and Louis Vuitton, shared similar sentiments. “He’s someone
with whom I love to speak about how to build a bag, or how to treat a thread,”
Mr. du Sartel said about Mr. Wright, whom he has
known since the 2000s.
In recent years, Ms. Poux-Bernard, who
is now a brand adviser, helped make an e-commerce site for Dragon Diffusion,
something Mr. Wright had resisted until the Covid pandemic. She recalled
pushing him to include more of his back story on the site. “But he is
stubborn,” she said with a laugh.
Dragon Diffusion bags typically begin as
life-size sketches drawn by Mr. Wright on big sheets of paper. Many of their
shapes and weaves are rooted in global basketry traditions. A point is for them
to show their craft.
The brand’s Māori Kete bag, Mr.
Wright said, was inspired by the kete baskets woven
with flax and sedge plants by Indigenous Māori on mainland New Zealand.
(His Māori grandmother used a kete to collect
seashells, he added.)
A pochette being woven, left, in the
style of Dragon Diffusion’s Maori Kete bag, right.
A basket made of interwoven banana
leaves was the basis for Dragon Diffusion’s Inside-Out bag. (The style’s
prototype was developed for Hermès, which did not use it, Ms. Poux-Bernard
said.) Mr. Wright bought the basket at a market in the Mariana Islands, while
sailing from Australia to Japan. “There was a lady selling vegetables at the
market and I asked her if I could buy the panier, not the vegetables,” he said,
using the French word for basket.
The rattan cane work of Thonet cafe
chairs inspired the weave of another Dragon Diffusion bag, called the Eclipse.
Its body comprises leather strips of slightly different thicknesses.
“Optically, it makes all the difference,” Mr. Wright said. He was speaking at
his office in Belgium, which was decorated with some of the hundreds of baskets
that he has collected over his decades of traveling the globe.
Most Dragon Diffusion bags are made with
water buffalo leather from the northern Indian state of Punjab. Goat, sheep and
cow skins are also used. Leathers are often vegetable-tanned, cut into strips,
dyed, then dried (preferably in the sun). Afterward, the leather strips are
waxed and treated with heat “to ensure color fastness and to nourish the
leather,” Mr. Wright said.
The AB Global factory employs about 700
weavers, Mr. Wright said, who together handle about 43 miles of leather strips
a day. They hand-weave bags on wooden lasts made for the factory by a pair of
carpenters. Another team of about 275 artisans, known as attachers,
finish the bags.
With many hands involved, if each bag is
not an exact replica of the other, the better for it, Mr. Wright said. “What I
strive for is imperfection — that’s what you want from handicraft.”
For the past decade or so, a last step
has been sewing a penny-size medal of Saint Christopher — a patron saint of
travelers, sailors and surfers — into each bag. Mr. Wright started adding in
the medals around 2010, after picking one up as a souvenir. They have been a
source of surprising “fan email,” he said.
Dragon Diffusion’s most popular bag is a
style called the Santa Croce, which has a weave that took six months to
perfect, Mr. Wright said. Were it not for help from a weaver named Selvam, Mr.
Wright added, whom he has been working with for 30 years, he might never have
figured out the design.
“Selvam solved the thing by free-handing
it,” Mr. Wright said.
Some products hold special significance
for Mr. Wright: The Māori Kete bag, he said, along with the Octo Multi, a
bag made using a knotting technique that involves combining leftover leather
strips in as many as 14 different colors. It was conceived by a weaver named
Shweta, and he still has the prototype design at his office.
“I always bring it to the trade shows,”
he said, holding up the prototype bag woven with black, brown, pink, blue,
yellow and other leathers.
“It’s my good luck bag,” Mr. Wright
added. “But my favorite bag is the next one — whether it’s for Dragon or
someone else.”