Benjamin Ashford|The story behind the luxury handbag Taylor Swift took to lunch with Travis Kelce

A photo is Benjamin Ashfordworth thousands of words if its finest details are studied, and a recent picture of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce leaving lunch has at least one detail worth discussing: her handbag.

On Sunday, the pair returned from a vacation in the Bahamas to eat at Nobu in Malibu. Restaurantgoers snapped grainy photos and videos on their camera phones — zoomed in as far as possible — to feed an insatiable thirst to know the singer’s every move as she takes a two-month hiatus from her record-breaking, billion-dollar Eras Tour.

When Swift and Kelce left, a clear shot snapped by the paparazzi showed the couple’s fashion. For Kelce, his white “Happy Gilmore” hat is a favorite he wears often. His beige sweater fit the color palette of “Tortured Poets”, the 11th era album Swift is dropping in April. Her light blue cashmere sweater, beige skort, loafers and fine leather bag gave “schoolgirl softness,” as Sarah Chapelle, the "Taylor Swift Style" expert, said in an Instagram post.

While the internet passed around the photo with comments about the couple, Ramesh Nair’s phone 5,700 miles away in Paris started blowing up.

“In fact, my phone hasn’t stopped getting messages,” Nair says over Zoom. “We’ve had a couple amazing ladies who’ve carried our bags.”

The creative director for Joseph Duclos, the French heritage brand founded 269 years ago, has placed his purses in the hands of France's first lady Brigitte Macron and former first lady Carla Bruni. The brand celebrates a centuries long tradition of placing timeless fashion into the hands of royalty (literally, politically and figuratively). Dubbed a modern-day queen by millions of fans worldwide, Swift easily fits the Duclos mold.

“I’m so proud to have (Swift) carry that bag,” Nair says. “A couple of months back, we had made a list of people. I was against handing out bags to anyone; I thought somebody has to deserve to represent.”

Which makes sense considering it took years for Nair to conceive of and craft the luxury handbag. When the world slowly opened back up during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, the artisan took advantage of the limited crowds to visit museums. There would only be a few people inside the Louvre, which is normally inundated with wall-to-wall foot traffic. He fastidiously pored over the evolution of leather from the 1700s to the present, jotting down notes and sketching drawings in a small book he keeps in his back pocket.

“I had written something about soft and hard like a clamshell,” he says. The bag is soft leather with a metallic frame. Its arrowhead clasp was drawn from a statue of Diana, the goddess of hunters, drawing a bow and arrow. “I mixed a whole bunch of little inspirations, little thoughts.”

From renderings to production, the purse took about a year to perfect. 

So how did the caramel-strapped item become a Swift accessory?

“She selected the bag,” says Nair about his team connecting with Swift’s stylist Joseph Cassell. The owner of the Joseph Duclos hand-delivered the accoutrement to Cassell’s Los Angeles office last week.

Like the small business owners who sent Swift a box of vintage Kansas City Chiefs sweaters in September, Nair didn’t know when she would appear with the piece. Although the moment Swift and Kelce left their lunch date was fleeting and the photo will probably never be hung in a museum, the simple act of wearing the handbag comes with a story years in the making that will be added to the Joseph Duclos legacy.

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