Why It Took 30 People to Make This Tote Bag

“Everyone Who Made This Happen” takes a look at the outsize teams of artists and creative types it often takes to produce a single work.

Number of people involved: Over 30.

Time from conception to completion: About a year.

When Matthieu Blazy was named the creative director of Bottega Veneta in 2021, he urged his staff to find innovative ways of working with leather. This meant looking past the intrecciato, the 58-year-old brand’s trademark technique of braiding flat strips of leather, often into a slanted grid pattern. One of their responses was the Kalimero bucket bag, which is made, without a single stitch, by weaving a single piece of leather around a wood block and was featured in the opening look of Blazy’s first runway presentation three months later. Last summer, after seeing a picture of Sicilian basketry in a book about the island’s craft traditions, the French Belgian designer, 40, issued an updated challenge: to fuse the house’s methods with those of ancestral basket weaving. If his team could make leather resemble denim — or silk or flannel — Blazy, who delights in trompe l’oeil, thought, why not cane, willow or other plant materials?