Le City House Shows 25 Years of What Owners Kept Inside

Handwritten notes, old tech and the small Y2K clutter people kept in their Le City bags for years are now on display, pulled out of the bags themselves. Le City House is Balenciaga's party for the bag's 25th anniversary, and the best thing about it is that it celebrates the bags people carried, not the ones in the window.

It's free, and it's open to the public.

The Paris house sits at 10 Avenue George V, the address where Cristóbal Balenciaga opened his couture house in 1937. It runs from November 10 to 19, the first stop in a series of interactive, multi room experiences in select flagships around the world. That's a grand room for a pile of old notes and Y2K gadgets, and it's exactly the right one. The couture house is finally making space for what customers did with the bag after they left the store.

Keepsakes From Inside Other People's Bags

The centerpiece is a giant "what's in my bag" installation. Balenciaga gathered the contents of Le City bags that belonged to longtime devotees and laid them out, handwritten notes next to the phones and gadgets of the early 2000s. It reads like a time capsule, because that's what a well used bag is.

Around it, the rooms trace the bag's story through archival designs and collectors' keepsakes. A house showing its own archive is standard. A house borrowing from the people who wore its product out is rarer, and it fits a bag whose appeal was always in how it aged.

The resale market figured that out first. Fashionphile has reported a 39 percent jump in demand for patina worn luxury handbags, and beat up Balenciaga City bags are on that list, selling at premiums over clean ones. The house is catching up to its own customers.

Ghesquière Made 25 for the Runway in 2001

Le City began as a prototype. Nicolas Ghesquière, then running Balenciaga, designed a soft, slouchy bag in 2001 with no logo, just studs, tassels and leather strung zipper pulls. Executives didn't want to put it into retail production, so he made a small run instead, commonly cited at 25 bags, and gave them to the models walking that season.

Kate Moss wanted one. Accounts differ on how she found it, after the show or at a fitting, but the house committed either way, and the Motorcycle bag became the City.

Then it became the bag of the decade. Lindsay Lohan carried it. Kim Kardashian carried it. It went from a runway gift to a 2000s uniform.

What's striking is how many hands it has passed through since. Ghesquière left in 2012. Alexander Wang, Demna and Pierpaolo Piccioli each ran the house after him, and Le City outlasted all of them.

Damienciaga and a Repair Desk Share the House

The newest pieces in the house come from Damien Hirst. His limited edition Le City series covers the bag in his spots, butterflies and mandalas, with spin paintings and embroidered patches in the mix, and each piece carries the handwritten word "Damienciaga." The range runs across the Le City Mini, Small, Medium and Large, plus wallets, pouches, card holders and micro bag charms. In an email interview with Vogue, Hirst described the bags as carrying both his and the house's personality, not simply one or the other.

Next to the art, the house gets practical. Personalization, care and repair assessment services are available by appointment, which means an owner can bring in an old City that's been carried hard and have it looked at. That's the most honest part of the whole thing. A bag built to age gets a desk for aging well.

The timing makes it stranger and better. Balenciaga announced Piccioli's exit on November 5, and the house named Martine Rose its new creative director the next day. She starts on November 16, while the Paris house is still open. Her first week on the job overlaps with a party for a bag she didn't design. She spent this fall on a Supreme collaboration with a Tyson Dunk.

So the one bag holding Balenciaga steady through a change at the top is a 2001 design by a director who left fourteen years ago, now carried by Nicole Richie and Rachel Sennott in the campaign, printed with Hirst's butterflies, and shown beside the notes its owners left inside it.