It starts with a bench in Istanbul.

The name

The work gets a name.

LA MODA begins in 1996 — a name put onto a bench, a trade and a room in Istanbul. Learning which part of a hide can be cut and which part has to be worked around is not something anyone picks up in an afternoon. It is something you get wrong for years first.

The date is not nostalgia. It is why someone here can pick up a hide, turn it over and know what it should cost — and why nothing reaches this site that would not pass at that bench.

A name is useful mostly because it can be held against you. It means there is an address for the complaint, and somewhere to come back to when the bag is twelve years old and the strap has finally had enough.

The city

Where the pieces are made.

Every piece is cut and sewn by hand in Istanbul, and ships from there. Full-grain cowhide, vegetable-tanned. Kutnu lining, woven on hand looms. Clasps and locks cut from cattle horn. Uncoated brass and lead-free alloy for the rest.

The collection on this site is made by GÖN, an Istanbul house of its own. We are the ones who choose it, price it and answer for it. The model names are theirs — Derin, Mata, Sırta, Kipe — and we did not rename them for an American audience. They are not ours to rename.

The new chapter

Closing the distance.

California is the new chapter, and it is a short one to explain. The work did not move. The route did. The pieces are chosen for this collection here, photographed here, and priced here — with no importer, no distributor and no showroom floor writing a margin into the tag.

What the shorter route pays for: free US shipping from $150, US duties prepaid so the price on the page is the price you pay, and hardware repaired or replaced free for two years, at material cost after. And if a seam ever gives, we repair it. Forever. Free.