You’re never too old to play with toys. That’s what we’ve learned from Maria Sole Cecchi, the handbag designer for Les Petits Joueurs, who owes a large part of her success to fiddling around with Legos.
As the story goes, at 19 Cecchi dropped out of law school, packed her bags and left her home in Florence. Her final destination was Paris, where she secured a job at a handbag store — and that’s when inspiration struck: Lego mosaic handbags. Why didn’t anyone think of it sooner? The concept was fresh, whimsical and completely unpretentious. Parisians went bananas and by 2010, Les Petits Joueurs was born.
Today, Cecchi’s luxury purses are produced by hand in limited quantities (a telltale sign of an It bag) and stocked at some of the top retailers in the world, from Bergdorf Goodman in the U.S. to Luisa Via Roma in Italy. They’ve also been featured in countless fashion magazines, including Vogue, ELLE, Nylon and Harper’s Bazaar.
Naturally, that makes them the perfect bait for street style stars. Les Petits Joueurs, which translates to “the small players,” beat out Anya Hindmarch, Celine, Olympia Le-Tan, Loewe and Kenzo for the most worn bag of Fashion Month Spring 2016. To see all the photographic evidence, click on the gallery above.
