This designer finds inspiration in ancient symbols and transforms them into modern collectables

I only spent half an hour with Mary Katrantzou, the first-ever creative director of leather goods and accessories at Bvlgari, but I can totally see her whipping out that tape with abandon, offering to measure anything you may set your eyes on. Though charged with designing bags that have little room for mundanities like practicality and pricing, the Athens-born designer is the consummate good student. Her memory of the story of the Italian fine jewellery house is uncanny and her love of learning is palpable.

It might be the result of having “grown up around culture and architecture, developing a sense of harmony and symmetry”. This becomes part of your formation as a designer, Katrantzou explains, drawing a through line connecting herself to Sotirios Voulgaris, the silversmith who left his native Greece for Rome, where he established the house of Bvlgari in 1884. “He looked at Rome from that perspective, and now, I’m discovering it in the same way.”

Apart from being ancient and obsessed with eating well, what connects the three cultures in our conversation—Greek, Roman, Indian—is our belief in the power of symbolism. The Serpenti, a zoomorphic Bvlgari totem that inspired the handle of its latest bag, Serpenti Cuore 1968, is just as attractive to Indian fans as it remains to Roman loyalists, representing prosperity and regeneration to both. I ask Katrantzou if she’s superstitious and she admits a dusting of it may have settled on her lately. “I believe in good and bad energy, and I can sense how you will make me feel and how open I can be. We are in control and shape our destiny, but a few years ago, I realised life shows you patterns that keep repeating. So if you understand them, it helps you make decisions very differently.”

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