Want les Essentiels de la Vie.

Want les Essentiels de la Vie wants you to travel in comfort and style. Their accessories are neither over nor underdesigned, with helpful details where you want them but without utilitarian excesses. Want chooses to be excessive instead with luxury materials and construction. At Pitti, Dexter Peart showed me what Want has planned for their imagined customer, a long-distance commuter with a penchant for technology, travel, and design.

Their current leitmotif is duality. Many of their standard models are mixing fabrications, and their recurring design touch is in their zips, which are half silver toned and half gold. The O’Hare tote, an evergreen model, is in Italian waxed cotton with trim in their organic cotton. Other bags use suede as the context for a calf leather, as in pocket that’s a perfect fit for an iPad–not a rare feature in bags these days, but thoughtfully integrated here rather than tacked on. Elsewhere, caviar leather (stingray) shows up in small leather goods. A fully reversible bag has been made with a double-faced wool blend: one side is gray, one is blue. Want has also made a slipper ideal for air travel: it collapses nearly flat and zips closed. Gray wool matches with cognac leather, and black with black.

At the show all the samples were displayed on collapsible displays of honeycombed kraft paper, topped with sweatshirt gray felt discs. Want is a Canadian operation, and Dexter explained it was some Canadian camaraderie that led them to use furniture from Vancouver’s Molo Design. One stool held a special made-in-Japan executive set, another held their new made-in-Naples gloves in cashmere-lined suede and leather, again with a Want gold/silver zip, and bracelets from a make near Milan. Their manufacturing is diverse–leather bags are made in Italy, some smaller goods in China, and some in Japan. That’s not surprising given the global scale of Want’s reach.