The Story of the Musette; Part 3

Here are the final finished Musettes. In the studio, and more importantly, on the Stolen Goat website, ready to purchase. In fact, they're already selling fast. And, I noticed in the new August British Vogue, there's a new 3.1 Phillip Lim bag which is in a very similar vein. 

Marion Leaves Scotland

Last week my very helpful and lovely student assistant Marion completed her 8 weeks work experience at my studio and returned to France. She'll now never know that temperatures north of Calais can reach over 20 centigrade!

On her final day we ate homemade chocolate cake and I gave her a pink Bow Clutch for all her hard work. She has been a great help to me over the past two months, and I will miss her!

The Story of the Musette; Part Two

With the dimensions of the musette set by tradition, there were still a number of design decisions to be made, including finding the perfect colour for a smart urban tweed musette? It needs to be modern, practical, interesting and wearable. It also needs to go with black, as black is integral to the Stolen Goat brand identity. In the end three colour-ways were selected; River Blue, Forest Green and Rolling Moss. 

Here's some of the process.

Cutting the pattern. 

The backs cut out.

 The fronts cut out with zipped pockets ready.

The Story of the Musette; Part One

A couple of months ago, I was approached by specialist cycling website Stolen Goat to produce some cycling related tweed bags, including a range of musettes. Now being a very fair weather cyclist myself, I didn't know what a musette is. It turns out it's a very basic feed bag for roadies. You can see them being handed to speeding cyclists in the Tour De France. Here's one from the 1959 tour.

Traditionally they're made from light cotton and are disposed of after use. My brief was to create a 21st century version of this classic bag, for the modern urban gentleman. The size was to be kept to the traditional dimensions, but its use would be less for high energy protein bars and more for iPad and notebook. It also needed to be weatherproof. Unfortunately we don't have the French summers over here.