Numbers game
Former lawyer Juliette Angeletti has found designing handbags to be the perfect way of combining her fascination with the Golden Ratio, her love of traditional French craft skills, and her commitment to upcycling and environmentally responsible production.
Paris-based leathergoods brand Phi 1.618 launched in 2019 at the hands of former international media lawyer, Juliette Angeletti. In spite of covid-19 lockdowns, the company has already managed to build up an enthusiastic following and applies a special nickname, ‘Les Phidèles’, to its most faithful customers. Numbers are growing and, for this brand, numbers matter, although not exclusively in the way they usually do for businesses.
The start-up is committed to environmental responsibility and selects for its products unused, surplus full-grain hides from tanners that supply much bigger luxury brands. All of this leather and all of the brand’s finished products are made in France. “This aspect is very important for me,” Ms Angeletti says, “because French know-how is so well known around the world. I am not speaking about me, but about the master artisans that we have here; they are really incredible.”
She may not put herself at those exalted levels, but Juliette Angeletti is also a qualified artisan, having completed a Certificate d’Aptitude Professionelle (CAP) diploma in 2018 while she was still working for a digital media company, devoting much of her spare time to it, taking classes and putting herself through a gruelling, practical final exam in which she had 12 hours over one-and-a-half days in which to create and construct a leather product. “I’ve always been creative since I was a child,” she explains. I was always drawing or painting, and later I took up Japanese embroidery and sewed many of my own clothes. Making things with my hands was always very important. Then I came to leather because I love bags and accessories. I decided to do the CAP and become an official artisan.” In no time at all, this led to the launch of Phi 1.618.
The brand has a base at La Caserne, an accelerator programme near Paris’s Gare de l’Est and Gare du Nord that aims to help new, artisan manufacturers become part of the leathergoods and fashion scene, with the emphasis on eco-responsible production. The set-up, which opened in 2021, encourages interaction among the companies that have established themselves there and with the public. Allowing shoppers to see how artisans work gives an interesting, added dimension to the project, Ms Angeletti argues. The city authorities decided this was a good way to give new life to a large, renovated former fire-station. “There are 40 of us at the moment,” she explains. “We are being incubated together, like in a greenhouse.”
She goes on to point out that 15 of the 40 companies work with leather and have a fully equipped, shared workshop on the site of La Caserne, established with the support of luxury group Kering. The start-ups that are focused on apparel and other fashion segments have a separate workshop with different machines. All of the start-ups are there for a three-year residence period. “We share our successes and also our problems with each other. We are all from different backgrounds and are all at different stages in our development and we try to find solutions together,” she says. “I feel very lucky to be part of it.”
Pursuit of perfection
Ms Angeletti’s inspiration for her name of the brand is the Phi Golden Ratio, which ancient Greek thinkers believed gave the most aesthetically pleasing shapes, principally a rectangle with sides in the proportion of approximately eight:five, but often with triangles, circles and other shapes embedded into it. She has worked this into the design of her bags, belts and bracelets.
The name points to precision and perfection, she explains, a perfection that is often present in the world around us. She continues: “The forms and shapes I want to use have been in nature for millions of years. The ratio, 1.618, is also called The Divine Proportion, and using it to make these products means the forms are natural. It’s not a question of fashion; I am not a fan of fast fashion.” The shapes and proportions she incorporates into her products are intended to create an overall look that will last a long time because they will always be pleasing to the eye. Over centuries, scholars have spoken of the influence of The Golden Ratio on a large number of famous artists including Leonardo Da Vinci, Botticelli, Salvador Dalí, Piet Mondrian and Albert Gleizes. Famous composers, including JS Bach, Mozart, Debussy, Bartok and Satie, are said to have incorporated the same idea into pieces of music they wrote. It is also an important component of the art of feng shui, which purports to aid harmony between individuals and their immediate surroundings.
Huge playground
Her determination to keep to the proportions of the Golden Ratio presents Juliette Angeletti with what she describes as a constraint in terms of the products she can design and create, but because the Golden Ratio is present in many objects we contemplate and admire frequently, her scope is still extensive enough. “In fact it is a huge playground,” she says, “because the Golden Ratio is everywhere. You can see it in the heart of sunflowers, in the gaps between leaves on the branch of a tree, in the nautilus seashell, in the Parthenon in Athens, the Egyptian pyramids and in Gothic cathedrals.”
From the world of art, her favourite representative paintings include Botticelli’s Spring, specifically the figures of The Three Graces who are among the subjects, the same painter’s Birth of Venus, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and Dalí’s Sacrament of the Last Supper. “It’s also part of us,” she points out, “because many people’s forearms are 1.618 times longer than their hands, and the Golden Ratio is also present in our DNA formations.”
The art of sourcing leather
To bring the conversation back to leather and bags, she explains that she picks out every single hide she uses, and she is very particular about how she goes about this. Nevertheless, she has had to work hard to gain access to the material she wants and sourcing leather still takes up a large amount of her time. She says she enjoys it. “It’s a very closed world,” she explains, “but I now have access to the exceptionally high-quality tanners that the major French brands use. They make the highest-quality leather there is.” Here is how this came about. Ms Angeletti put huge effort into building up trust with these tanners and with the buyers of leather of some of the major brands. After about a year, they accepted that she presented no threat to them, that copying anyone else’s product styles formed no part of her plan and that she was acting in good faith.
She holds many of these more established brands in high esteem. In particular, she admires the levels of quality and attention to detail that are on show in bags by Hermès and Delvaux and, although she says these brands are working at levels “far above mine”, her appreciation of the work that goes into their bags is real and her interest is keen. She likes the fact that, while these brands do introduce new collections regularly, iconic items such as Hermès’s Kelly and Birkin bags continue to be produced year after year.
Her bridge-building work has paid off. The leather manufacturers are now content to let Phi 1.618 source material in this way, snapping up the excess from the articles the brands they work for have specified for previous collections. If there is a downside, it is that the start-up brand has to make do with material and colours that are left over after the big brands have consumed as much as they want. “I can go and choose what I want,” Ms Angeletti says, “but it has to be from what they have extra.” She explains that if a big leathergoods brand decides it wants 1,000 hides of a particular specification in a particular colour, the tanner will often process more than 1,000, mostly to give something of a buffer in case of follow-up orders. If, in time, these hides remain unused, Phi 1.618 is able to buy them if it wishes.
Limited edition
Whether it wants to or not depends on the material’s suitability for the brand’s own needs and its customers’ preferences. She is under no contractual obligation to buy any specific volume. However, she does need to use this system to try to find the leather she needs for every bag she makes; she is not in a position to dictate to the tanners what they should produce and she finds herself working with a list of items to search for among the leather manufacturers’ leftovers. Some of the time, though, she is able to rely on the tanners to know what she is looking for and call her when the leather becomes available; the relationships she has built up are strong enough for that, and she believes that one of the reasons for her close connection to these tanners is that they recognise her as someone who is an ardent supporter of leather.
“I have access to this leather, then, but only in small quantities per colour,” the founder says. “This means my bags are very limited-edition, and they are all numbered. That’s interesting for clients, though, because it means they are very unlikely to find anyone in their local area with the same bag.” This, she argues, is also part of a commitment to environmental responsibility. There will not be new Phi 1.618 collections every six months, and although the brand will try to introduce new colours from time to time to offer Les Phidèles an opportunity to vary their look, the expectation is that they will demonstrate their fidelity by keeping and using the bags for a long time.
A different design
In terms of design, the lawyer-turned-leathergoods-entrepreneur knew she wanted “something different” from a standard tote bag. She likes her styles to be plain, with no metal or wood detail on show. She says it’s important for her to have designs that are “the purest possible” and for the viewer’s eye not to be distracted from the leather. The Golden Ratio features, of course. The Philo bag, for example, is round, but takes its inspiration from Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. More rectangular bags, such as the Phiori, have pleats [see front cover]. If you unfold all of the pleats in a Phiori bag, you will end up with a leather rectangle. And if you measure the width and the height and divide the higher number by the lower, you will, of course, end up with 1.618. The idea of incorporating pleats pleased Juliette Angeletti, but she soon realised that placing pleats in a piece of leather, in exactly the right positions, was a specialist job, “an art that I did not know”.
She drew what she wanted and used heated tools to attempt to put pleats into leather on her own, only to find the material had gone flat again by morning. She approached a master of origami, the Japanese practice of paper-folding, Paris-based Junior Fritz Jacquet. Using paper, Mr Jacquet was able to create in three dimensions what she had drawn. “It worked with paper,” she explains. “It allowed me to see how the volumes played out, but it still wouldn’t work with leather.”
Her next port of call was to another artisan, a master pleat-maker, Karen Grigorian, who works with many of the Paris-based luxury houses to apply pleats to a wide range of objects in a variety of materials. Ms Angeletti showed him her drawings and the paper model of the yet-to-be-realised Phiori bag. Then it occurred to her that perhaps the best way to solve the conundrum would be to have the two master craftsmen work together. It worked and the result was a first prototype of the Phiori.
Reliable feedback
Usually without having to call in experts from other crafts, and taking advantage of the facilities available at La Caserne, she constructs a first prototype for any bag she is thinking of creating and examines it carefully to find ways of making it better. This leads to a second prototype, which she gives to friends and some of Les Phidèles to see if they see things that need further improvement. She incorporates their feedback into a third prototype, which is usually the last one and the version that goes into production.
This leads us to the next chapter of the Phi 1.618 story. Production of the brand’s bags takes place in a small independent leathergoods workshop in the Centre-Val de Loire region of France, about 200 kilometres south-west of the capital. “This is my usual workshop,” Ms Angeletti says, “and it is exceptional. I am very lucky to work with it.”
Strong relationship-building here too allowed her to be part of the transformation of the recommendations and advice of Mr Jacquet and Mr Grigorian into the finished Phiori. Mr Grigorian, for example, insisted that it was worth trying to use lambskin in this project because had had always found it easiest to pleat. But it was too small for the Phi 1.618 design. Then he suggested deer, which was too soft. What worked in the end was calfskin of a thickness of between 0.8 and 1 millimetre. “It cannot be thinner or thicker than this,” the brand’s founder says. “Otherwise it does not work. So, here the sourcing is very important again.”
This experience has served only to make her commitment to sourcing leather and manufacturing her bags in France even stronger. She says she always knew this would cost and she calculates that her production set-up is probably twice as expensive as it would be to have something similar in Italy, three times more expensive compared to Portugal and as much as eight or even ten times more expensive than it would have been to set up a production flow with partners in North Africa. She believes it will pay off.
Shop talk
Famous Parisian department store Printemps has been sufficiently impressed by the development at La Caserne to have planned a special section for 12 of the leathergoods brands that are part of the accelerator programme to sell in store what they make. This will come about later this year. Juliette Angeletti, who had contacts at Printemps, was instrumental in setting this up. She says Printemps will take this further and make a similar arrangement for La Caserne’s fashion start-ups, too, from the start of 2023. For some time, there has been plenty of interest at Printemps in vintage products, including vintage leathergoods. The project with Phi 1.618 and the other La Caserne brands introduces a new dimension: upcycling.
In addition, the brand has its own boutique in the rue du Bac in central Paris and has stockists in four other cities in France, two in Italy, two in the US and one in Japan. It also has its own online sales operation, but online-only is not the way forward for it. Juliette Angeletti wants shoppers to have the chance to see her products in real life and for these to make an impression and resonate in exactly the same way as other objects created in keeping with the Golden Ratio do.
Limited-edition bags from Phi 1.618. The Paris-based brand uses leather from high-end French tanners, but only sources hides that are surplus to the requirements of the most prominent luxury brands.
Credit: Phi 1.618.
