ORBISLEATHER & BAG MAKERS IN MILAN 8 shops in the atlas.Illustration
Leather & Bag Makers in Milan
8 stores · curated ORBIS register
Borbonese builds part of its bag collection around the occhio di pernice pattern, associated with the house since its early history. L'Artigiano adds hand-worked leather bags and belts from a Brera workshop to the Milan selection. Manikomio Dsgn takes inspiration from naval parachute duffles for its Aviator's Kit Bag, made in Italy alongside related accessories.
Italian leather goods brand launched in 1991 by designer Alviero Martini, built around his geo map print inspired by an antique map he found in a Moscow bookshop in the mid-1980s; flagship stores in Milan and Rome.
Best for Map-print travel bags.
Alviero Martini 1a Classe was founded in 1991 by Italian designer Alviero Martini, born in 1950. The brand's signature - a print reproducing the look of an antique world map - traces to an object Martini found while working in Moscow around 1986-87: an old map he bought in a bookstore there and brought back to Rome. That geo map print became the house's identifying design language and the basis for its 'Geo Collection' of bags and travel goods. The company describes itself as an Italian leather-accessories house built specifically around that map motif, with two flagship stores in Milan and Rome.
Borbonese has made Italian bags since 1910, built around its partridge-eye (occhio di pernice) print. Its suede-and-canvas signature was conceived to be recognizable at fifty metres across the house's leather-goods collections.
Figus Designer has handcrafted Made-in-Milan bags and accessories since 1979, in both genuine leather and animal-free materials. Its online store sells bags, small leather goods, jewels and belts with worldwide shipping.
Best for Leather Goods, Bags, Handmade, Accessories
Italian leather-goods label founded in 2020 by Massimo Cabbia, reinterpreting the WWII-era Navy parachute duffle ('kit bag') as the handmade, Italian-manufactured Aviator's Kit Bag and related bag and accessory lines.
Best for Aviation-leather bags
Manikomio Dsgn began in 2020, when founder Massimo Cabbia — a longtime figure in the bag and fashion industry — came across an original American paratrooper's duffle bag from World War II at a vintage market. Bought during lockdown, the bag became the starting point for a new label built around reinterpreting military-surplus design in a more finished, contemporary form. The brand's signature piece, the Aviator's Kit Bag, is a direct descendant of the tactical duffle bags used by U.S. Navy paratroopers to carry their parachutes, remade in leather and technical materials and produced by hand in Italy. Manikomio Dsgn has since expanded into a broader range of bags, backpacks and accessories — including the Lady 24, Icon Original and BB models — while keeping manufacturing in Italy and running some pieces as small, limited-edition archive releases. The brand is sold through its own online shop and a network of Italian leather-goods retailers and boutiques such as Galise and Sergio Fabbri, rather than through freestanding stores of its own.
Milan leather house founded 1928 by Stefano Serapian, an Armenian refugee who began selling handcrafted leather goods by bicycle around the city. Introduced the Mosaico woven-leather technique in 1947, still made at the Villa Mozart atelier.
Best for Mosaico-woven bags and refined briefcases.
Serapian traces its origins to Stefano Serapian, an Armenian who fled violence in his homeland in the early 1920s with his brother Aramays, settling first in Venice and then Milan. In 1928 Stefano began working independently with fine leather, initially selling his handmade pieces by cycling through the city's streets. In 1945 he formalized the business into a bespoke leather atelier together with his wife and business partner, Gina Flori. Two years later, in 1947, Stefano introduced Mosaico — a technique of interlacing narrow strips of lamb nappa leather into a mosaic-like woven pattern, an idea drawn from his interest in treating leather as if it were fabric, with a decorative motif recalling Middle Eastern mosaics. The Mosaico weave became, and remains, one of the house's signature elements, used across bags and small leather goods. Leadership passed through three generations: from Stefano to his son Ardavast, and later to descendant Giovanni Nodari Serapian. The house is based at Villa Mozart, a historic Art Deco building in Milan that houses its atelier and boutique, and the brand has since expanded internationally, including a presence in Tokyo's Ginza district.
Trussardi began in Bergamo in 1911 as a fine leather glove workshop, later expanding into Milan's leather-luxury lifestyle house. Its greyhound emblem, adopted in 1973, has marked the brand across a century of Italian leather goods.
Best for Greyhound leather goods.
Trussardi began in Bergamo in 1911 as a glove workshop — Dante Trussardi's fine leather gloves supplied royal houses and, eventually, the Italian army — and the greyhound that became its emblem in 1973 announced the transformation: grandson Nicola Trussardi turned a glover into Milan's leather-lifestyle house, among the first Italian labels to think in total-brand terms, from bags to cars' interiors to restaurants.
Nicola's instinct for spectacle made the greyhound a Milanese fixture — he staged fashion's first show at La Scala and turned Piazza della Scala's Palazzo Trussardi into a cultural salon with a Michelin-starred café. The leather goods carried the argument: saffiano-textured bags and accessories built with glove-maker fineness.
The family era ended gradually — tragedy took Nicola in 1999 and his son Francesco in 2003; daughters Beatrice and Gaia carried it forward before investors took control. The house today is smaller than its myth, but the myth is the asset: a century of Italian leather, one lean silver dog.
Milanese architectural leather since 1937 — the Iside and Brera in pergamena calf, logo-free. Brand name is a portmanteau of valigia (suitcase) and extra. Original atelier was on Piazza / Via San Babila (first-party: Via San Babila 1).
Best for Architectural handbags and quiet luxury leather.
Valextra was founded in Milan in 1937 by Giovanni Fontana with a rationalist's brief: leather goods as architecture, ornament omitted, structure exposed. The house grew up alongside Milanese modernism — its 1950s designs won the Compasso d'Oro orbit's admiration, its travel cases defined jet-set functionalism — and it has never once printed a logo on a bag. Identification is by construction: black-lacquered "costa" edges painted by hand, pergamena calfskin like fresco plaster, geometry you recognize across a room.
The Iside, a trapezoid top-handle with a single clean clasp, is the modern flagship; the Brera bucket, the Tric Trac from 1968, and the Boston line extend the vocabulary. Everything is built in the Milan atelier with visible-seam honesty — the antithesis of embellishment as luxury.
Collectors call it the Italian answer to Hermès discretion; the house calls itself simply Milanese. Valextra remains the connoisseur's password: the bag that says nothing, and is therefore heard perfectly by exactly the right people.
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