WHAT MAKES A LUXURY BACKPACK BEAUTIFUL? MPM DOPPIO, GUCCI JUMBO & THE ROW BACKPACK 11
A backpack is perhaps one of the most difficult objects in luxury to make genuinely beautiful.
Its origins are practical rather than elegant. It is designed to carry weight against the body, usually through two shoulder straps, and its traditional vocabulary belongs more naturally to mountaineering, military equipment, school bags and outdoor travel than to tailoring. This explains why even extraordinarily well-made luxury backpacks can appear strangely out of place when worn with an elegant jacket or suit.
And yet the backpack remains one of the most useful objects for the contemporary traveller. The question therefore becomes interesting: can a large luxury backpack retain everything that makes a backpack practical while becoming an object one might genuinely wish to wear with elegant clothes?
The Gucci Jumbo leather backpack, The Row Backpack 11 and the Maison Philippe Montagne Doppio approach this question from three very different directions.
Gucci: the traditional backpack as a luxury statement
The Gucci Jumbo remains immediately recognisable as a backpack. Its large central body, flap, drawstring closure and two substantial lateral pockets belong to the traditional vocabulary of expedition and utility bags, while the oversized embossed GG motif transforms that familiar construction into an unmistakably Gucci object.
There is creativity here, but it comes principally through reinterpretation and house identity. Gucci takes a recognisable archetype and amplifies it through material, scale and branding.
The result has considerable presence. Yet that presence also makes the bag visually assertive. With relaxed clothes this may be precisely its attraction; beside formal tailoring, however, the substantial pockets, rounded volume and repeated GG motif create a deliberate contrast rather than disappearing naturally into the silhouette.
It is luxury through character and recognition.
The Row: beauty through reduction
The Row follows almost the opposite path.
The Backpack 11 removes much of the visual language traditionally associated with backpacks. Large uninterrupted surfaces of calf leather, an extremely discreet drawstring closure, almost invisible branding and very little exterior hardware produce an object of remarkable visual calm.
Its beauty lies largely in restraint.
This also makes The Row particularly easy to imagine beside sophisticated city clothing. Nothing competes aggressively with a jacket, coat or trouser line, and the softness of the construction gives the bag a certain elegant nonchalance.
Yet minimalism and creativity are not necessarily synonymous. The underlying idea remains that of the drawstring backpack, refined and purified rather than fundamentally reconsidered. Its distinction comes from proportion, material and reduction.
It is a beautiful interpretation of an existing archetype.
MPM Doppio: questioning the archetype itself
Maison Philippe Montagne began elsewhere.
The Doppio was not conceived by taking an existing backpack and subsequently making it more luxurious. Its development began with a broader question: how could a travel backpack become sufficiently elegant to accompany a well-dressed traveller without losing the functionality that makes the backpack useful in the first place?
Here Art Deco provides a design method rather than decoration.
Geometry, proportion, architectural lines and controlled symmetry structure the object, while box leather gives the Doppio a more defined silhouette than the softer constructions traditionally associated with backpacks. The intention is neither to disguise its function nor to reproduce the familiar outdoor archetype in more expensive materials.
It is to reconsider the form.
This is also why the Doppio can be carried in three different ways: conventionally as a backpack, horizontally as a briefcase, or vertically as a hand-carried bag.
The transformation is significant aesthetically. With informal clothes it remains a backpack; with more formal clothing, the same object can leave the shoulders and become something closer to an architectural briefcase.
Versatility becomes part of the design itself.
Avant-garde and timelessness
There is always a danger in pursuing originality for its own sake.
An object can be unusual today and dated tomorrow. Conversely, an excessive pursuit of timelessness can produce something perfectly tasteful yet already familiar.
MPM therefore works around a deliberate tension between avant-garde and timelessness.
Art Deco is particularly interesting in this respect because its geometry can still appear modern a century after the movement emerged. Its lines can create distinction without depending upon seasonal fashion, while proportion and architectural construction provide a framework within which experimentation remains controlled.
The Doppio attempts precisely this balance: sufficiently unusual to possess an identity of its own, yet sufficiently restrained to remain understandable as an elegant travel object.
Functional Beauty
And this is perhaps where the three bags reveal their philosophies most clearly.
With Gucci, utility is visually expressed. The pockets, flap and drawstring are immediately readable and become part of the aesthetic.
With The Row, function is visually suppressed in favour of purity. The bag appears almost elemental: leather, volume, opening, straps.
With MPM, function is integrated into the architecture.
The multiple carrying possibilities, pockets, structured construction and ergonomic elements were not conceived after the exterior form had been decided. They participated in its development.
This is what Maison Philippe Montagne calls Functional Beauty.
Not beauty on one side and practicality on the other, followed by an attempt to compromise between them, but the possibility that function itself can contribute to proportion, construction and ultimately beauty.
It reflects the broader MPM Modus Operandi: searching for balance between beauty and function, avant-garde and timelessness, distinction and usability.
Which one belongs with the well-dressed traveller?
There can be no objective answer to which of these three backpacks is the most beautiful. Beauty remains personal, influenced by culture, proportion, memory and individual taste.
But certain differences can be observed.
The Gucci Jumbo deliberately embraces the visual vocabulary of the traditional utility backpack and gives it powerful Gucci identity.
The Row offers perhaps the purest and most understated proposition, reducing the backpack towards an elegant minimalist object that can sit relatively quietly beside sophisticated clothing.
The Doppio follows a different path. Rather than refining or simplifying the established backpack archetype, it attempts to rethink it through architecture, Art Deco geometry and multiple modes of use.
For a traveller specifically looking for creative and avant-garde design combined with versatility between travel and elegant city life, those characteristics give the Doppio a particularly distinctive proposition.
And perhaps that is ultimately the more interesting question.
Not whether one backpack is universally more beautiful than another, but whether beauty can emerge when an object designed principally for utility is reconsidered from the beginning in pursuit of it.
For MPM, that pursuit is precisely where Functional Beauty begins.
Further reading:
Mix + Match series: MPM Lungo, Jacques Marie Mage, Tag Heuer
The most creative luxury backpack?
The story behind the MPM Lungo. A conversation with the designer.
Forbes magazine. Maison Philippe Montagne the Herald of Art Deco
Brand names mentioned are used for editorial purposes only. Read our full editorial policy.
The comparisons presented in this article are based on publicly available product specifications, published dimensions, materials, features and observable design characteristics at the time of writing. Assessments concerning aesthetics, creativity and elegance remain inherently subjective, while evaluations of functionality, versatility and travel features are based on the products’ published technical information.