Es gibt zwei Dinge, für die die einstige italienische Königin Margherita von Savoyen unvergessen bleiben wird. Sie soll Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts während eines Aufenthalts in Neapel Gelüste nach einer dort typischen Pizza verspürt haben. Mehrere Pizzabäcker aus der Stadt lieferten ihre Versionen. Die mit Mozzarella, Tomate und Basilikum von Raffaele Esposito soll ihr am besten gefallen haben, womöglich weil der Belag die Farben Italiens repräsentierte. Seither trägt die Pizza den Namen Margherita, den die ganze Welt kennt.
Es gibt aber auch noch ein anderes, ungleich passenderes Produkt, das nach der Gattin von König Umberto I. benannt ist: die kleine kompakte Luxushandtasche von Franzi 1864. Die Königin hat sie zwar nie getragen, aber gäbe es in Italien noch Royals, dann wäre sie das passende Accessoire, denn Franzi 1864 steht wie kaum eine andere Marke für die Tradition des Landes und die italienische Handwerkskunst.
Franzi? Die Welt kennt Gucci, Prada und Fendi. Wer aber ist Franzi? Tatsächlich war das Label lange in der Versenkung verschwunden, und nur noch ältere Italiener konnten etwas mit der Marke anfangen, die 1864 gegründet wurde.
The man who brought it back to life and relaunched it in 2021 is sitting this afternoon on a green sofa in the showroom on Corso Venezia, one of Milan’s grand avenues. Marco Calzoni comes from an old Milanese family. The showroom in the stately apartment that belongs to his family exudes a dignified calm. Oil paintings hang on the high walls, the ceilings are decorated with stucco, an old leather suitcase with a wooden frame stands in the middle of the room and will play a role later.
When Calzoni, a well-dressed businessman with perfect manners, talks about Franzi in polished English, he gets excited. The business economist came across the old brand as part of a consulting project. “I immediately recognized that there was an incredible story behind it that needed to be told,” he says today.
The brand was founded as a leather goods company by Felice Franzi, who took over the business from his father and opened a shop in Via Manzoni in 1864, “one of the first luxury shops here,” says Calzoni. Franzi was soon supplying royal families in Italy, Austria, Greece and Egypt with his suitcases. The company made a name for itself when Felice’s son Oreste traveled to China to learn the craft of vegetable tanning. As the first leather goods manufacturer in Italy, he was thus able to do without expensive chemicals. Another unique selling point of the Franzi suitcases was their lightness.
As if to prove it, Calzoni stands up and asks the guest in the showroom to lift the old suitcase with a wooden frame. In fact, it seems at least as light as a hard-shell suitcase of today. Franzi ultimately produced everything that had to do with travel and transport. The company won two medals at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1900. Franzi also produced the first thermos flasks, which the Italian airship pioneer Umberto Nobile took with him on his expedition to the North Pole in 1926, shortly after the product was launched on the market.
Without Franzi, Gucci would not exist
Nowadays, Italian luggage is more likely to be associated with the Gucci brand, which also began its success story with the manufacture of suitcases. But what few people know is that without Franzi, Gucci would not exist. An advertisement from 1921 still exists today, which explicitly states that company founder Guccio Gucci learned his trade from Franzi – clearly an honor at the time.
In addition to travel bags, doctor’s bags and containers for men’s beard and hair care, Franzi eventually also launched women’s handbags and developed into a sophisticated luxury brand with its own stores not only in Milan, Rome and Florence, but also in London and Vienna. After the Second World War, the company also worked with the Italian automobile and furniture industries. In 1967, the designer Cini Boeri designed the futuristic ABS suitcase series, which is still on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Ferrari, Bugatti and Maserati also used Franzi leather for the interiors of their models. None of this disguised the fact that the brand’s appeal began to fade towards the end of the century. Production was discontinued in 1998 and no one seemed to be interested in the former luxury brand of kings and queens anymore.
Until Marco Calzoni came along. It took him four and a half years to bring the brand back to life. He looked for investors and a manufacturer with particularly high quality standards. Today he has a team in Florence that specializes in the high-quality production of luxury bags. And he delved into the archives of the Milan company before finally relaunching the brand in 2021.
The first bag he brought onto the market was the re-edition of the Margherita, the bag named after the Queen of Savoy, who was born in Turin in 1851 to a German mother and was Queen of Italy from 1878 to 1900. He took two key features from the old model: the leather-covered stud strip – and the “two faces” of the bag, as Calzoni puts it. The loop with fastener is on both sides. The bag is available in two sizes, four different types of leather and 15 different colors.
In his view, the Franzi bags are on the one hand nostalgic because they are reminiscent of Italy in the 1950s, “but on the other hand they are contemporary because they are tailored to the needs of the modern customer.” This includes not only a cell phone compartment but also the level of quality. A Margherita consists of 178 parts and it takes a week to make it entirely by hand.
A bag that goes back to Camilla Cederna
The Margherita has now grown: Camilla, Fernanda and Luisa. All of Franzi’s bags have names. “The namesakes are strong women who inspire us and who shaped their time,” says Calzoni. One example is Camilla, a slightly larger bag that has nothing to do with the British queen and wife of Charles III. The namesake is actually Camilla Cederna, an Italian journalist and feminist who fought against corrupt male politics in the 1970s and never left the house without a pearl necklace. The Italians called her “donna coraggio”, a courageous woman. In contrast to the Margherita bag, the Camilla model is more spacious and suitable for business women, as it can also accommodate a tablet. And like the other bags, it also has an additional leather strap that can be used to hang it over the shoulder or diagonally across the body.
Fernanda, on the other hand, is a bag dedicated to Fernanda Wittgens, an art historian who took over the directorship of the Pinacoteca di Brera museum in Milan in 1940, making her the first female director of a major museum in Italy. The latest product from the Franzi family is Luisa, named after Marquise Luisa Casati Stampa, whose eccentric style shaped Italian fashion in the first half of the 20th century and who served as a muse for many artists. She is also called the Lady Gaga of the 1920s – and Lady Gaga, in turn, has appeared several times in Casati-inspired dresses in recent years. The Luisa bag in gold, an evening bag that the wearer can wear with a chain, would have been a good match.
Calzoni builds up the brand step by step. New models and accessories are added, such as the silk scarves in typical Franzi patterns, which also serve as the lining of the bags, including patterns from the 1940s, which are made by Mantero on Lake Como, the most famous fabric producer in Italy. Franzi bags are now sold all over the world in large luxury stores, in Japan for example in the Takashima department store chain, in the USA in the luxury department stores of Neiman Marcus and in Germany in the Apropos concept stores.
Calzoni has managed to dust off the old bag brand and modernize it. But his bags are more than just fashionable accessories, they are classics. “Franzi is not a fashion brand, it is a luxury brand,” he emphasizes. And a Margherita, Camilla, Fernanda or Luisa is a bag for life.
#Franzi #brand #lease #life