Celine's artisans, named

Jean-Claude Beaumont·September 8, 2026·5 min

The workshop sits on the third floor of a limestone building in the 10th arrondissement, windows facing north to catch the steadiest light. Véronique Mallet has been at her bench for twenty-two years, and for the last eight, her hands have shaped every iteration of Celine's Triomphe bag. Not the design — that belongs to Hedi Slimane — but the physical object: the way the flap meets the body, the tension in the strap as it threads through brass hardware, the imperceptible curve that keeps the silhouette from collapsing when empty.

She is not alone. Across the room, Laurent Dubois manages the cutting table. Downstairs, in a separate atelier dedicated to metalwork, Samir Benali oversees the production of the Triomphe clasp, a process that involves fourteen individual operations and two rounds of hand-polishing. These are not celebrity artisans. They do not appear in campaign imagery. But without them, the bag does not exist.

The Bench

Mallet came to Celine in 2002, midway through Phoebe Philo's first tenure, though she trained elsewhere. Her apprenticeship was classical: three years at a small atelier in the Marais that specialised in document cases and attache work, the kind of structured leather goods that demand absolute precision. No give in the material. No room for approximation.

When she speaks about her work — and she does so reluctantly, in the manner of someone who would prefer the object to speak for itself — she returns again and again to the idea of résistance. Not resistance in the political sense, but the physical property of leather under tension. A strap must resist without stiffening. A gusset must hold its shape but yield when pressed. These are problems solved by hand, through repetition, and they do not translate easily to specification sheets.

The Triomphe presented a particular challenge. Slimane's design, introduced in 2019, called for a structured bag with soft edges — a contradiction that required the frame to be rigid and the surface to remain supple. Mallet's solution involved a composite interlining, three millimetres of vegetable-tanned leather laminated to a synthetic mesh, which she shapes over a wooden form before the outer shell is applied. The process takes forty minutes per bag. It cannot be rushed.

"People see the clasp," she said in a 2021 interview with Le Figaro. "They don't see the architecture underneath."

The Cut

Laurent Dubois has been cutting leather for Celine since 1998, which places him in the building before Philo, before Michael Kors, during the tail end of the house's first chapter as a bourgeois luggage concern. He is sixty-one now, and his title — chef d'atelier for cutting — understates the role. He does not simply execute patterns. He reads hides.

Leather is not a uniform material. A single cowhide can vary in thickness by half a millimetre from shoulder to flank, and the grain tightens or loosens depending on the animal's age, diet, and how the hide was stored before tanning. Dubois works with full-grain calfskin, which means the surface has not been sanded or corrected, and every imperfection — a healed scratch, a vein pattern, a shift in texture — remains visible.

His job is to map those imperfections and cut around them, or, when the flaw is minor, to position it where it will be least conspicuous: under a strap, along a seam, in the interior pocket. He works from a paper pattern, but the pattern is a guide, not a rule. On a busy day, he might cut sixty pieces. On a difficult hide, he might cut twelve.

The Triomphe requires eight cuts per bag: two for the body, two for the flap, two for the gussets, one for the strap, one for the interior divider. Dubois estimates he has cut somewhere in the vicinity of forty thousand Triomphes. He does not keep count.

The Clasp

Samir Benali does not work with leather. He works with brass, which Celine sources from a foundry in the Jura and machines in-house. The Triomphe clasp — a rounded arc that echoes the curve of the Arc de Triomphe, rendered in polished or brushed metal — is his domain.

Each clasp begins as a stamped blank, which is then filed, bevelled, and polished by hand. The bevelling is critical: too sharp, and the clasp will snag fabric; too soft, and it loses definition. Benali uses a series of abrasive papers, progressing from 400-grit to 2000-grit, and finishes with a rouge compound on a muslin wheel. The process takes eleven minutes per clasp, and the result is a surface that reflects light without glare, a quality the house refers to as poli mat.

He has been at Celine for sixteen years, and before that, he trained as a jeweller. The transition was not as distant as it might seem. Both trades require an understanding of how metal behaves under pressure, how it catches light, how it ages. Brass, unlike gold, oxidises. Over time, a Triomphe clasp will develop a patina, a darkening along the edges where skin oils accumulate. Some clients polish this away. Others prefer it. Benali is neutral on the question.

"It's a mark of use," he told Les Echos in 2020. "Not damage."

The Assembly

The final assembly happens at Mallet's bench, though others contribute. The strap is attached by Clémence Roche, who has been with the house for six years and specialises in stitching. The interior pocket is set by Mathieu Gerin, who joined in 2019 and works exclusively on linings. The clasp is affixed by Mallet herself, using a small brass hammer and a leather-covered anvil to avoid marring the surface.

The entire process, from cut leather to finished bag, takes between eight and ten hours, depending on the hide and the hardware finish. Celine produces the Triomphe in twelve colourways and three sizes, and while some steps have been mechanised — the edge-painting, for instance, is now done by a programmable arm — the core construction remains manual.

Mallet has trained four assistants in the past eight years. Two have stayed. One moved to Hermès. One left the trade entirely, citing the repetition. She does not find the work repetitive. She finds it variable.

"Every hide is different," she said. "Every bag is different. You don't see it from the outside, but we see it."

What Remains

Slimane's contract with Celine runs through 2025, though renewal seems likely. The Triomphe has become a signature, and signatures, once established, tend to persist. Mallet will be fifty-three by then. Dubois will be sixty-four. Benali will be forty-seven. None of them have indicated plans to leave.

The question, as it always is with maisons that rely on manual labour, is what happens when they do. Celine runs an apprenticeship programme, though it is small — three to five new artisans per year, selected from vocational schools in the Île-de-France. The training period is two years, and the attrition rate is high. Not everyone has the temperament for work that demands both precision and patience, and pays less than a software engineer makes in six months.