How the Madrid is built.

Most of what a luxury bag costs is the name, not the making. The Madrid is built the way the houses build theirs: a reinforced base, saddle-stitched handles, painted edges, solid hardware, and a leather chosen to hold structure. Every bag is finished by hand and checked before it leaves the workshop.

Every Madrid in the first production run is numbered, with a card in the box.

Pebble-grained leather, structured and scuff-resistant. A pebble grain is the finish the houses use on their structured, everyday bags, and for a practical reason: the grain hides scuffs, fingerprints and the marks of daily use far better than smooth leather, and it holds its shape rather than slouching. It softens a little at the handles over the first months and keeps its line.

How to check: drag a fingernail lightly across the grain. It should leave no mark. Press hard with a thumbnail: the grain should spring back rather than stay dented.

Saddle-stitched by hand at nine stitches per inch, waxed linen thread. Saddle stitching uses two needles on one thread, passed through each hole from both sides and pulled tight by hand. If one stitch is ever cut, the rest hold. A sewing machine uses a lockstitch, which unravels from a single break. Handles and base corners, the two places a bag fails first, are saddle-stitched on every Madrid.

How to check: count the stitches along one inch of the handle base. You should count nine. Look at the thread from both sides: a saddle stitch slants the same way on the outside and the inside.

Solid brass, sand-cast, 18-micron gold finish, hand-polished. The turn-lock plate, the padlock and the four feet are sand-cast in solid brass, then plated with gold to 18 microns and polished by hand before they go near the leather. Most handbag hardware is hollow and plated at two or three microns; it tarnishes within a year. Solid brass at this plating depth does not.

How to check: solid brass is heavy for its size and cold to the touch. Tap the padlock against the plate: it rings rather than clicks.

Four solid brass feet, hand-set into a reinforced base. They lift the leather off the ground and take the wear the corners would otherwise take. Every edge is hand-painted in several thin coats, sanded between each, so the paint flexes with the leather instead of cracking. The lining is suede-finished calfskin, tone-matched, not fabric, so the inside wears the way the outside does.

The Madrid is a structured top-handle bag in pebble-grained leather, in three sizes (25, 30 and 35 cm) and ten colours, from $325 to $545. Because the workshop that made it is the workshop that repairs it, every Madrid carries a lifetime repair guarantee. The details of that guarantee are on the care and repair page; sizes and what fits in each are on the size guide.