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Longchamp
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On 1 February 1948, Jean Cassegrain opened a tobacco shop near the Palais-Royal in Paris and began selling a novelty: pipes wrapped in fine leather. The product found an audience, and within a few years Cassegrain had expanded into small leather goods - wallets, passport covers, key rings - selling through the department stores and specialty shops of postwar Paris. He named his brand after the Longchamp racecourse in the Bois de Boulogne, choosing a jockey on a galloping horse as its logo. The name carried a second, private joke: "Cassegrain" literally means "crush grain" in French, and the racecourse was named for the flour mill that once stood at its end.
Through the 1950s and 1960s, the house broadened steadily into bags and luggage, and in 1971 it launched its first dedicated women's handbag collection. Jean Cassegrain's son Philippe joined the business and brought a more pragmatic eye to product design. In the 1970s Philippe sketched a line of travel bags in khaki nylon with leather handles - light, packable, and durable in a way that leather alone was not. The line sold well and established a template the house would return to.
The moment that defined Longchamp's global identity came in 1993, when Philippe Cassegrain designed Le Pliage. Inspired by the Japanese practice of origami, the bag folds flat in four steps to roughly the size of a paperback book. The body is nylon canvas; the handles are "Russia leather", a vegetable-tanned hide with a distinctive texture. The combination is light, water-resistant, and inexpensive enough to own in multiple colors. It became one of the best-selling bags in the world and remains so: Le Pliage has been produced in hundreds of colors and limited editions, with artist collaborations including Tracy Emin, Jeremy Scott, and a 2020 Pokemon capsule collection.
The third Cassegrain generation took over leadership in the 2010s. Jean Cassegrain (the founder's grandson) became CEO, his sister Sophie Delafontaine became artistic director, and his brother Olivier led North American expansion. Under Delafontaine, Longchamp began showing ready-to-wear collections and debuted its first full runway show at New York Fashion Week in 2018, broadening the brand beyond its accessories identity. The house remains entirely family-owned, with roughly 1,500 retail points across 80 countries and manufacturing still centered in France.
At auction, Longchamp items appear regularly in Nordic auction rooms as part of fashion and accessories lots rather than dedicated handbag sales. The 55 items on Auctionist are spread across Swedish houses including Laholms Auktionskammare (19 lots), Kaplans Auktioner (12 lots), and Stockholms Auktionsverk. Results are modest by fashion auction standards: the top recorded sale is 6,000 SEK for a travel set, while a Roseau Croco handbag reached 2,475 SEK. The Roseau line - a structured leather bag introduced in the 1980s with a bamboo-inspired toggle closure - tends to attract the highest secondary market prices among vintage Longchamp pieces. On international resale platforms, vintage leather Longchamp bags typically trade between 100 and 500 USD, well below the major luxury houses, which reflects the brand's positioning as accessible luxury rather than investment-grade collectibles.