Black Givenchy Antigona Bags aren’t exactly a tough sell; not only has the brand been moving them briskly for seasons, but the ultra-expensive exotic versions sell out before they even hit the sales floor. It’s the kind of bag every designer dreams of creating, because it more or less enables a company to print money for a couple of years. There are limitations to every mega-popular bag, though, and Givenchy might have found one of them when it remade the Antigona in glossy fish skin.
When you think about it, bag designers get their materials from lots of weird animal sources: snakes, lizards, ostriches, sting rays. Logically, using a fish skin with large scales isn’t any different. In the case of this Givenchy bag, the fish is a pirarucu, which hails from the Amazon basin in South America–that’s exotic in every sense of the word. In the past, Alexander Wang has used perch for a selection of bags and shoes, which sounds a little less exciting.
Ultimately, though, the idea of “fish skin” may just not be luxurious enough for high-end consumers. Most people think of fish as smelly, slimy and not entirely pleasing to the touch, which are not exactly the associations a brand wants to create between customers and its leather goods, even if the finished, processed product is aesthetically pleasing.
Despite my more logical instincts, I don’t think I could get my emotional reaction to “fish skin,” as a phrase, in check. I’m not going to be buying this bag, but if you do’t mind the idea of a fish purse, you can have an Pirarucu Antigona of your very own for $3,596 via SSENSE. (My reaction may not be isolated; the bag has been discounted from an original price of $4,495.)
Let us know in the comments how you feel about fish skin as an exotic leather.
