After selling Longchamp in Melbourne for 35 years, we finally opened our first Longchamp boutique on Collins Street. It’s the front half of the Hunt Leather store, and we will always have all of our other brands as before, but the Longchamp will now be properly presented in the beautiful environment of the Longchamp store…
Thanks to the wonderful team in Melbourne for enduring the refit, and the endless dusting that it causes. Proper photos soon!
We had our first ever Biggest Morning Tea at Hunt Leather on Friday 13th – perhaps that was a bad choice, as it was at 9:30 and of course it was the day that the Harbour Bridge was closed for four hours with a protester…
But the morning tea went off beautifully. We invited our neighbours in Balmain, our friends at Punch, Sarah Lorden Real Estate, Art Therapy and Pinpoint, and raffled a gorgeous Longchamp Darshan bag.
Cakes and brownies all disappeared, and we raised over $600. Thanks to all for the help and the kind donations – it’s a cause very close to our heart.
After years of searching for somewhere to open our first Longchamp boutique in Melbourne, we decided to convert the Collins Street end of our Hunt Leather store. The boss (Betty Hunt) and son Sam were down there for the day before the demolition… The builders are moving in tomorrow!
Love the editorial in the April issue of marie-claire – with two of our favourite bags: a Kate Moss for Longchamp Gloucester bag in khaki, and an Il Bisonte canvas in khaki with chocolate leather trim. Yum.
Love this article from “A time to get”, an LA blog… And the pictures of his worn-in Il Bisonte briefcase are lovely. But maybe, I should say “don’t try this at home”!?
Below is a new “7 Questions” with Brad, over at Drink Moloko. In his answers, he mentioned his Il Bisonte bag. We’ve spoken about it before, when he was asking about roughing it up a little. I passed on to him a comment I was once told. About a year ago, I was buying a cowhide rug, for my sister, from a vendor on the sidewalk of La Cienega Blvd. You know, where the guy has all the rugs thrown over the chain link fence… yeah, I bought one of those. As I was paying him, I asked him about cleaning it. “What if she spills something on it”, I ask. He looks at me, smiles (missing a few front teeth) and says, “Shit man, throw it out in the yard and hose it off. It was a cow for cryin’ out loud. It lived in a fuckin’ field”.
Below are pictures of my Il Bisonte bag, which was given to me by someone who didn’t like the “new” look of it (thanks Tom). After my friend gave it to me, I went home, threw it in the washing machine with some detergent, then let it dry in the sun. Beautiful. It might be expensive, but don’t be afraid to add a little life to your leather goods by hosing ‘em off, washing ‘em, or leaving them out in the sun. It can handle the abuse… after all… it was a cow for cryin’ out loud.
The gorgeous video of the new Kate Moss for Longchamp… A first for Longchamp and also for Kate Moss – a three minute movie shot in Marrakech, with the new collection. It’s the third season that Kate has worked with Longchamp, and we love it…
Well, it seems ages ago now, but appropriately “wintry” to visit a little while later. I visited Chicago for the “luggage show”, which is normally in Las Vegas. Having spent a long week in Las Vegas for a luggage show in the 90s, I was thrilled about the new venue, a city that we seem to know all about from movies and gangster tales and even E.R… but I was amazed at what I found. After a chilly reception, minus-something and blowing snow, I had a terrific intro with a tour by “Chicago Detours’ The Loop: Explore without Freezing”. It was still March, so all the boat and architecture tours were in hibernation, but the Chicago Detours was a gem, setting me up with possibly the best coffee I’ve had anywhere (and that’s saying something, if I may be so bold). Called Intelligentsia, it is a totally obsessive group of coffee nerds making amazing coffees… Who would have thought that Chicago could possibly beat Balmain or Melbourne in this regard?
In the time I had spare I revelled in the public art – the original Mayor Daley started the regeneration of Chicago with a Picasso sculpture. I almost fell over a Miro, and loved the “bean” – the most photographed spot in Chicago, a stainless steel thingummy also known as Cloud Gate, by Anish Kapoor. Just in front of a stunning stage by Frank Gehry.
Oh, that we could have such vision in our city of Sydney – where we have instead a developer-designed horror going onto our harbour called Barangaroo….
And the luggage show? Terrific! For me – I visited some of our long-term suppliers, and found some great new things as well. And saw a lot of scarily awful bags along the way…
London was all about spring – shops full of budding hyacinths, bright fuchsia and citrine, camel everywhere, not a warm jacket in sight. On the street it was drizzling, cold, and grey – how anybody can be expected to buy summer clothes in the middle of a long winter is beyond me! At least in Australia we have warm winter days when we can use our imagination……….
We were lucky enough to visit Singapore for the Longchamp meetings in January, timed nicely to coincide with the opening of the latest Longchamp store in Singapore at the megalithic new Marina Bay Sands development. The wonderful Cassegrain family were nearly all on hand to attend the official opening, as well as Hong Kong celebrity Bernice, who came with her own fan club of poster-waving girls and boys…
The fox has been our mascot since 1975, and sometimes we have customers trying to buy the stuffed fellows who appear somewhere in each of our Hunt stores, but we have to decline, as we have never been able to find any more! Sometimes people wonder why we would associate ourselves with fox hunting, and I think this picture explains it beautifully. Go the fox!
