Carla Braccialini, who co-founded one of Florence’s best-loved handbag houses and spent decades proving that an accessory could make people laugh, died in Florence on 3 November at the age of 95. Italian news agency ANSA and Vanity Fair Italia both reported her death, remembering a businesswoman who took a tiny workshop and turned it into a name known far beyond Tuscany.
A workshop, some glue and a carpenter’s needle
The story began in 1954, when Carla and her husband Roberto opened a small leather workshop in Florence. She liked to recall that her very first bags were stuck together with ordinary craft glue and stitched with a carpenter’s needle. She had no formal training in leatherwork, and she later said that was a gift: she could imagine a bag first and only then work out how to make it. After Roberto died in 1976 she took charge of the company, running it with their three sons, Riccardo, Massimo and Lorenzo.
In the late 1980s the firm signed a licence to produce and sell accessories for Vivienne Westwood, a partnership that helped carry Florentine craftsmanship onto an international stage. In 2009 Italy’s then president, Giorgio Napolitano, named her a Cavaliere del Lavoro, the country’s honour for entrepreneurs who have helped build its economy.
Bags shaped like taxis, trains and little houses
What made Braccialini instantly recognisable was not a logo but a shape. Collections were filled with flowers and animals, and many handbags took the form of everyday objects: taxis, trains, snails, nesting dolls. Some had surprisingly personal roots. After her bag was snatched in central Florence in 2003, taking with it photographs of her children and a small pebble her youngest son had given her, she designed a bag shaped like a house, another place where we keep the things that matter most.
Even the catwalk was a chance to play. She once admitted that simply parading accessories down a runway felt rather dull, so she staged shows full of fantastical characters instead, hoping to raise a smile in gloomy times. When the minimalist 1990s demanded calmer, plainer designs, she adapted and waited for her moment.
A legacy of joyful design
In 2021 she told her life story in a book written with journalist Maurizio Naldini, modestly titled La ragazza che non sapeva fare le borse (The Girl Who Didn’t Know How to Make Bags). The brand has belonged to the Arezzo-based Graziella Holding since 2017, but her spirit lives on in every bag that refuses to take itself too seriously.
Her example is a good reminder that personality matters. Whether it is a bright crossbody bag, a characterful shoulder bag or a pair of playful earrings, the pieces we love most are often the ones that tell a story. Browse our full bags collection for leather designs with a little character of their own.
Sources: Vanity Fair Italia, ANSA, FashionNetwork Italia, Firenze Post.
