Polène Paris - Numéro Neuf East-West

Holiday Edit
Polène’s Numéro Neuf East-West

written AMANDA MORTENSON

Polène entered the industry in 2016 with an unusual clarity of purpose. The three founding siblings, Elsa, Mathieu, and Antoine Mothay, built the brand around a conviction that design, craftsmanship, and material should form a single conversation.

They wanted a house that felt contemporary in its rhythm yet grounded in the discipline of artisanship. Within a few years, that direction resonated globally. Polène opened spaces in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, London, Copenhagen, and Hamburg, each reflecting their attitude toward calm precision and intuitive form. The growth felt fast, but inside the brand the focus stayed steady: refine, edit, and let the work speak. What shaped Polène’s rise is their close connection with Ubrique, the leather-making region in southern Spain. More than 2,200 craftspeople bring the designs to life, giving the brand a direct link to a long-standing tradition. The Paris design studio develops the visual language; the artisans translate it into structure, weight, and tactility. This exchange has defined Polène’s identity—clean silhouettes, sculpted leather, organic lines shaped by hand. Their collections show a consistency that comes from respect for the material and for the people who work it.

Polène also thinks in systems. Circularity became part of their process early on. They introduced the Plèi collection, where leftover leather from bag production becomes macramé surfaces, bead work, objects, and collaborative pieces with guest artisans. The intention is simple: use material fully and treat every offcut as something with potential. In 2023, the brand expanded into jewelry, produced by Italian specialists and plated with 24-carat gold. The pieces follow the same design instincts—shaping, folding, and texturing the metal with the same attention given to leather.

Among all lines, the Numéro Neuf collection has become a signature. First introduced in 2020, it reflects the house’s interest in structure softened by movement. Full-grain calfskin is molded, draped, stitched, and shaped until it carries volume and gentleness. It is one of the clearest expressions of Polène’s vision and a marker of how the brand approaches form.

Polène Paris
Numéro Neuf East West bag Camel

Polène Paris
Numéro Neuf East West bag Ebony

This season, the Numéro Neuf East-West marks a new chapter. The design extends the original silhouette into a long, horizontal format and introduces a shoulder-bag version for the first time. It reads as confident and composed, with a contemporary zip closure and an elongated profile that gives the piece a distinct attitude. Available in Black, Camel, Taupe, Chalk, Ebony, Black Cherry, and Sand, the model is crafted in Ubrique using the same meticulous process as the rest of the collection. Every detail shows intention, from the shaping of the leather to the precise seams that hold the draping in place.

Polène Paris
Numéro Neuf East West bag Taupe

Polène Paris
www.polene-paris.com

based in Paris, France and creating handcrafted leather goods produced by skilled artisans in Ubrique, Spain

Polène Paris Numéro Neuf East-West price: 440 €

LE MILE selected the Numéro Neuf East-West for this year’s holiday season recommendations because it represents exactly what we look for: a design with clarity, a strong sense of identity, and craftsmanship that feels immediate when you hold the piece. It aligns with Polène’s broader story of thoughtful growth and with our interest in objects that carry aesthetic strength and quiet emotional presence. As the season approaches, this bag stands as one of the most grounded and assured releases of the year—an example of how contemporary leather goods can be relevant, refined, and deeply considered.

Polène Paris
Numéro Neuf East West bag Chalke

Polène Paris
Numéro Neuf East West bag Chalke

Polène Paris
Numéro Neuf East West bag Taupe

Valentino Garavani DeVain - Age of Electric Couture

VALENTINO GARAVANI
*Craft, Code and the Curious Case of DeVain

Valentino Garavani DeVain appears in the digital ether with a calm, almost ceremonial presence, occupying that peculiar zone where craft speaks to code and the instinct of the atelier leans toward the logic of algorithms. A quiet meeting unfolds between centuries of handwork and the cool hum of computational imagination. The maison’s dedication to gesture, material and emotional precision finds itself mirrored by an AI engine that renders its own forms of ornament and atmosphere, a pairing that feels unexpectedly harmonious and gently provocative, as if couture and circuitry were testing the edges of each other’s worlds without losing their sense of poise.

Thomas Albdorf opens the procession. In his mirrored chambers the bag performs a gentle act of multiplication, slipping between reflection and refraction with the calm confidence of an object aware of its own charisma. His studio becomes a small observatory where materials converse with their own silhouettes and symmetry grows its own contemplative pulse.

Enter The Void descends deeper, their world resembles a dream rescued from a half-remembered video game and dipped in an extraterrestrial ocean. Fishes drift between cacti, hotel chandeliers rise from dunes and the bag glows like a passerby who has wandered into someone else’s subconscious. This is surrealism with the autofill function humming quietly underneath, the kind that feels familiar and feverish at the same time.

Maison Valentino presents DeVain as the new protagonist in a sprawling visual experiment, inviting five artists to take the bag far from the usual marble floors and closer to the evolving frontier where images appear before they exist. In a cultural landscape that worships immediacy, this series arrives as an ode to crafted illusion, stretching the definition of what creative authorship can become when imagination merges with machine logic.

Paul Octavious
still from the film below

Paul Octavious transports DeVain into the long corridors of art history. Sixteenth-century still lifes breathe again, except this time they blink, shift and fold into layered animations. The bag perches among fruits and goblets like a visiting character who has slipped through a tear in a tapestry. Octavious choreographs a conversation between centuries without asking for permission, giving classical composition a sly digital pulse.

Annie Collinge builds a world where objects and cut-out figures share the same mischievous logic, creating a tableau that feels playful on the surface and quietly uncanny underneath. The bag appears among her colours and silhouettes like a character stepping through a handmade stage set, moving through scenes where humour and strangeness sit comfortably side by side. Her universe blurs reality just enough to remind viewers that imagination always has its own rules.

Total Emotional Awareness
still from the film below

Total Emotional Awareness leads DeVain through a landscape where pop forms stretch, multiply and reorganize themselves with dreamlike intent. Geometry expands, colours pulse and the bag moves through a vision that feels sculpted from pure imagination. Their world hovers between play and philosophy, creating a visual rhythm that absorbs DeVain into an ever-shifting field of possibility.

Z_Captures throws DeVain into sharp contrast with everyday pop objects, creating collisions that feel playful and deliberately disorienting. The bag sits among bold colours and unexpected pairings, adopting a presence shaped by tension and surprise. His compositions turn contrast into structure, allowing fantasy and pop culture to occupy the same vivid frame.

Tina Tona finishes the first chapter by exploding the visual field entirely. Her collages vibrate with color and hand-cut energy, weaving fragments of memory, culture and playful rebellion. The bag slips between viewpoints, blooming into countless versions of itself. Tona’s world has texture, movement and a joyful refusal to stay still.

Albert Planella approaches the bag as if it were an apparition. Here DeVain becomes mutable and cinematic, drifting between clarity and haze with a rhythm that feels borrowed from dreams. His images hold their breath while shifting into new states of being, as if the bag were quietly considering who it wants to become next.

For a house that reveres human craftsmanship, this digital series introduces a new tension. Energy-hungry algorithms sit beside centuries of artisanal knowledge. The contrast generates friction, and the friction generates light. The visuals shimmer with a strange kind of beauty, born from human impulse and computational curiosity. DeVain emerges from the experiment slightly transformed, carrying the patina of a bag that has travelled through mirrors, deserts, dreams, archives, memories and machine logic. The result feels like a quiet promise that creativity, in all its evolving shapes, still belongs to those who dare to stretch the image until it reveals something unexpected.

note
The video and image works in this project were created by nine participating artists: Thomas Albdorf, Enter The Void, Paul Octavious, Albert Planella, Tina Tona, Animus Pax, Annie Collinge, Total Emotional Awareness and Z_Captures. The AI-generated visuals were produced by Enter The Void, Paul Octavious, Albert Planella, Animus Pax and Total Emotional Awareness; all imagery by Enter The Void was created with the informed consent of the portrayed models and all participating talents.