August 22, 2026

The story behind the MPM Lungo. A conversation with the founder of Maison Philippe Montagne, Paris.

Philippe Montagne

The story behind the MPM Lungo.
An old idea, elongated: Philippe Montagne on the flight bag he refused to leave alone

A conversation with the founder of Maison Philippe Montagne, Paris.

Some objects are so settled in their form that redesigning them looks, at first glance, like vanity. The satchel briefcase is one of them — a shape so old that generations of houses have simply repeated it, changing the monogram and calling it a collection. Maison Philippe Montagne looked at that settled shape and saw, instead, an unfinished question.

The result is the Lungo, and in this first conversation of a double portrait, Philippe Montagne talks about the passion that would not leave a perfectly good bag alone.

The satchel briefcase is perhaps the most classical object in leather goods. What made you want to touch it at all?

Precisely that it is classical. I am drawn to objects that everyone believes are already finished, because that is where the real work is hiding. The satchel briefcase we know today descends from something quite specific and rather beautiful — the flight bag, the pilot's case. A working object, built for men who needed their instruments and their documents close at hand in the cockpit. Somewhere along the way the aviation left it and only the silhouette remained, repeated everywhere, decreasingly interesting. I could not accept that the shape had exhausted its possibilities. The pursuit of beauty is never satisfied with "this is simply how it is done." So we went back to the pilot's case and asked what it would become if someone still cared, today, the way those first makers cared.

What did caring actually change?

The dimensions, first of all — and this is the part people underestimate, because it sounds so modest. We reduced them. Not dramatically, but with intention, until the proportions shifted from "case" to something closer to a drawing, a sharper silhouette that reads as elegant the instant you see it rather than merely useful. That single decision is where the innovation and the sophistication both live. It is astonishing how much character a few centimetres, taken away in the right places, can give an object.

The bag stopped announcing "I am equipment" and started saying something quieter and, I think, more seductive.

The name carries that idea of stretching, doesn't it — Lungo, the elongated espresso?

Exactly, and I chose it for the double meaning, which I find rather pleasing. Lungo, from the Italian for long, is the espresso pulled with double the water — un café allongé, as we say in French, an elongated coffee. Our Lungo underwent something structurally similar: a compact form, elongated in proportion, while remaining compact in nature.

Small gesture, large effect — which is also, now that I think of it, a fair description of a good espresso.

You have also called the bag a trompe-l'œil. That is an unusual word for a briefcase.

It is the word that best describes what we were actually chasing. A trompe-l'œil is an optical illusion, most often in painting — a surface that convinces the eye of a depth or a volume that is not quite what it appears. That is precisely the game we played with the Lungo's length, width and height. We wanted a bag that reads as sharp and slim — a bag an airline agent glances at and waves through, certain it will slide into the cabin gauge without a second thought — while in fact holding, once opened, far more than that slim reading promised. The eye is told one story; the hand discovers another. I find that kind of honest deception irresistible in design. It is not about hiding the bag's capacity out of modesty.

It is about refusing to let the bag look like what it merely does. Beauty first, always — the usefulness reveals itself afterward, as a pleasant surprise rather than a boast.

Was there a moment in development where the design nearly went wrong?

Many moments, if I am honest, though none as dramatic as the discarded suitcases of the 96Hrs. The satchel briefcase is a more forgiving shape to draw and a much less forgiving shape to perfect, because the entire history of leather goods is watching over your shoulder. Every proportion I tried, I could immediately place next to some existing case from some existing house, and the question each time was: does this variation earn its existence, or is it merely different for the sake of difference? That is the real discipline of working inside a classical form — you are not inventing from nothing, you are arguing with a tradition, and the tradition is very good at winning arguments. The Lungo is the version of that argument I was finally willing to sign.

Where does the everyday life of the bag begin?

With the commute, which was always part of the intention. We reduced the dimensions so the Lungo lives happily in daily use — the office, the meeting, the ordinary Tuesday — but we refused to let it become merely decorative in the process.

It still packs for a short trip: outside, the big zipped pocket for the passport, wallet or sunglasses, a flat pocket for the newspaper, the pass-through sleeve for a sweater or a trolley handle; inside, the padded pocket for a sixteen-inch laptop, and a place for everything else the modern nomad carries, down to a full change of clothes and a second pair of shoes, should the day become two. A bag that only performs in the office and collapses the moment you ask it to travel is not, to my mind, a finished bag. Ours had to do both, without confessing effort in either direction.

A last question, before we turn to the more technical conversation. What does the Lungo mean to you, personally, inside the collection?

It is perhaps the purest expression of a belief I hold about our whole Maison: that the most interesting avant-garde is not the one that invents an entirely new object, but the one that looks at the object everyone has stopped looking at, and finds the beauty still hiding inside it.

Anyone can be radical with a blank page. It takes a particular kind of patience to be radical with a pilot's case that has existed, more or less unchanged, for the better part of a century — and to come away with something that feels, at once, entirely new and entirely inevitable.

And so the pursuit continues.

As it always does here. The Lungo began as a question about a shape everyone believed was finished, and it answers, I hope, with a shape that finally looks the way it always deserved to. That is the whole of the pursuit of beauty, really — not chasing novelty, but paying an old idea the attention it was always owed.

The Lungo satchel is available in Tan, Cabernet and Mocca.
Maison Philippe Montagne — Avant-Garde Luxury Bags. Pour le Voyage.