After 13 years in business, Zoe Latta and Mike Eckhaus are finally introducing an Eckhaus Latta bag. But as it turns out, they’ve been thinking about it for a lot longer than that. “We’ve been talking about doing a bag for a million years prior to starting Eckhaus Latta,” Eckhaus explained on a recent video call. “I used to work at Marc by Marc [Jacobs] doing men’s bags and accessories a million years ago.” Latta finished his thought: “And because of that it was this kind of off-limits place, where we were like, ‘Oh, you need so so many resources.’ We were intimidated by it because we knew how much it took.”
“People were always asking us when we were going to have a bag—I knew one day we would figure it out,” he paused. “And then you had a dream, Zoe.”
There’s a Jenny Holzer aphorism that goes, “In a dream, you saw a way to survive and you were full of joy.” But in a dream, Latta saw a bag instead. “When you came to me after the dream, it was about this idea that the mechanism that ornaments the bag is also its utility,” he explained. The Snap, as the bag is called, is a sleek medium leather hobo with snap decorations surrounding the handle and is available in black, brown, green, and red. But the magic—what Latta saw in her dream—comes from how some of the snaps are functional and unsnapping them expands the bag into a boxier, roomier shape. “Progressively, we really want our clothing to be things that people can just live in and have this very everyday quality,” Eckhaus added. The bag is meant to be for work, going out, and the weekend. One can only imagine the leather getting better and better with age.
Although Eckhaus Latta’s clothes are often unisex, the designers concede that they conceived this bag as “existing in a more feminine space.” “There are other styles down the line that I would say are more masculine, but we thought it would make sense to have our first one be a bit more femme,” Eckhaus explained. “We have an awareness that women are definitely buying more capital-B bags than men are,” Latta said. At launch, The Snap will be available exclusively at Eckhaus Latta and later will be sold at other retailers. The pair expects to launch other styles later this year. “There are so many seasons where we’re making hundreds of SKUs and we don’t even have time to reflect on what we did because we’re already moving on to the next thing,” she said. “This [bag] has a deliberateness unlike any other product we’ve ever made.”
Photo: Michael Hauptman/Courtesy of Eckhaus Latta