Leather goods and accessory design across two companies: a capsule collection designed with actor Kalki Koechlin for heritage leather house Hidesign, and a broad leather-goods portfolio designed for export house Paras Exports.
A capsule of leather bags and wallets designed at Hidesign around actor Kalki Koechlin as muse — ten ranges of 23 bags and 10 wallets, each built around one material idea and pushed across a family of silhouettes rather than treated as a one-off design. Five of those ranges are shown here in full: Alive, Caged, Croco, Evolve and Masai Mara.
Alive builds around one rounded, half-moon body — a bowling-bag silhouette with a wide double-zip mouth, finished in deep-emboss croco leather and dressed in a jewel palette of forest green, cherry red and black. Polished gold hardware runs the length of the zip pull, and a small gold "V" stud marks every piece as the same family, whatever the size. The range steps down from a top-handle bag to a slim clutch wallet, so the same silhouette can move from a day bag to an evening piece.
Caged takes its name from the exoskeleton of cross-laid leather straps wrapped around every piece — a grid of contrast-toned belting, cinched at each intersection with a small brass rivet, worn over a soft pebbled-leather base. The cage does double duty as structure and decoration: it reinforces the bag's corners while carrying all of the visual interest, so the base leather can stay quiet underneath. The family runs from a structured, twin-handle tote and a rounded duffel down to slim zip pouches and card cases, always in the same two-tone caged construction.
Croco shares Alive's deep-emboss crocodile leather and gold "V" hardware, but takes it into a more tailored silhouette — a structured tote with twin rolled handles and a hardware-capped zip, paired with long tri-fold wallets in a contrasting colourway. The palette runs from ink navy and forest green to cognac and black. Where Alive reads as a going-out bag, Croco is its going-to-work counterpart — same leather, same hardware language, a different day.
Evolve strips the palette back to matte black and lets one design move carry the whole range: a diagonal, wedge-cut flap set into the front panel, echoed in a matching angular handle on the tote-bucket. The silhouettes are architectural rather than soft — a structured bucket bag, a panelled backpack and a slim envelope pouch — pitched at a harder, more urban register than the rest of the collection. It's the evolution the name promises: the same design family, pared down to its geometry.
Masai Mara is the collection's most narrative piece — a rounded hobo body in burnished tan leather, its panels joined with visible whipstitching and finished with a hand-carved, tribal mask charm and a dagger-shaped pendant on a brass chain. Its silhouette and colour story borrow directly from Maasai beadwork and warrior dress, scaled into a five-piece family — tote, hobo, crossbody, backpack and wallet — sharing the same zigzag stitch line, braided handle detail and hardware set across every size. Shown here in its original campaign photography, shot on location on the savanna it's named for.
Designing inside an established heritage leather house is a different discipline from designing a one-off product: every range had to hold its own idea — a texture, a construction detail, a colour story — while still reading as part of one coherent capsule bearing a muse's name. That meant working backward from a small number of design "hooks" (a hardware stud, a strap treatment, a stitch line) and pushing each one across a full family of bag and wallet silhouettes, so the collection scaled to 23 bags and 10 wallets without ever feeling assembled rather than designed.
A smaller gallery, and a different kind of practice. Where the Hidesign capsule was brand-storytelling for one muse, Paras Exports is a leather-goods export house designing at volume for international buyers — a wide, fast-moving catalogue spanning men's and women's bags, belts, backpacks and small leather goods. Working there meant designing for manufacturability and range-breadth first: getting a strong silhouette right once, then producing it fast across colourways, materials and price points for a portfolio this broad.
A laptop messenger bag spray-painted on buff harness leather, so every piece takes on its own graduated colour field rather than a flat dye lot — finished with brass antique hardware.
Quilted backpacks in cow leather (black) and sheep leather (orange & white), lined in black cotton twill and finished with gold hardware — a diamond-quilt panel and a two-zip front pocket repeated across the colour run.
A range of four named sling bags built around one crossbody format and pushed into four distinct characters: Yafob, a structured buckled messenger sling in burnt orange — the biggest and most architectural of the four; Youni, a boxier flap sling in burgundy snake-effect leather; Yiven, a mustard cross-body with a flap and a hand handle; and Yev, a slim black sling finished with a leather tassel.
Men's belts across six leather colourways and finishes, from a perforated saddle-brown strap to a fine braid — each built from the same buckle library, strap-end shape and edge-stitch construction. Braided brown and black are the strongest of the run.
The suede line runs softer and more decorative than the rest of the Paras catalogue — a fringed bucket bag, two hand-embroidered floral clutches and a shoulder bag, a colour-blocked striped crossbody, a suede backpack, and a run of fringed hobo and envelope bags in teal. Fringe and tassel work stand in for hardware; embroidery and colour do the rest.
Hidesign asked for a muse translated into a coherent capsule; Paras Exports asked for one good idea multiplied cleanly across a catalogue. Together they're the range an accessory designer works across day to day — brand storytelling at one end, production-ready breadth at the other, the same eye for material and silhouette carrying through both.