PARIS — Longchamp Taps Accessories Designer Stéphanie  Should you are taking a backpack or will a belt bag do for the day? Due to the unfolding collaboration between Longchamp and Paris-based Belgian accessories designer Stéphanie D’heygere, an individual won’t should select.

Riffing off a 2019 foldable poncho design she made for the French brand, D’heygere has expanded Longchamp’s versatile Le Pliage tote right into a six-item capsule collection suitable for urban dwellers come rain or shine.

While not every item within the six-piece line may be transformed just like the oversize tote and belt bag that each unfold into backpacks, D’heygere made sure so as to add the fun in functional.

An umbrella with a strap may be slung across the body, bandolier style. The poncho, a rain hat and trousers, easy to roll up and practical on the go, could well be streetwear or festival gear. All are available six colorways, from classics like navy and white to zestier decisions, like fuchsia pink or a leopard print.

Longchamp artistic director Sophie Delafontaine met D’heygere while she was a jury member for the 2018 ANDAM Prize, where the Belgian designer won the accessories prize.

Delafontaine said she’d been “very impressed by the way in which [D’heygere] twists function, plays with functionality.”

Finding the concept of getting multiple functionalities in a product “cool,” she invited D’heygere to revisit the French label’s famous Le Pliage foldable tote.

“It was a neat pitch because [Longchamp] asked me to work around Le Pliage but without doing a bag,” remembered D’heygere.

The result was a raincoat that rolled up right into a belt bag that sold out shortly after its 2019 release and “embraced thoroughly this concept of recent mobility” that segued with Longchamp’s offering of lightweight, sturdy travel products.

For the second iteration of their collaboration, they expanded on this concept of mobility, here tweaked with the concept of “mobility in the town itself” and “twisting the Pliage spirit right into a full capsule collection.”

Being in an urban setting means “temperatures are never ideal” for walking or cycling, “there’s a little bit of rain, of wind and we also thought in regards to the proven fact that it could possibly be people in transit for work,” said Paris-based D’heygere, who feels that “practical but fashionable” could possibly be that little extra push to get out the door.

Using recycled materials for this capsule segued with Longchamp’s more sustainable approach but can also be a direction that D’heygere began exploring within the spring 2023 collection of her own brand, where she turned her stash of now-defunct DVDs into earrings.

D’heygere said a serious draw on this collaboration is the “democratic” side brought by the French brand’s audience, many-fold larger than the one for her independent jewelry brand. Longchamp’s foldable tote is a bag that has a universal feel to it, having been “carried by so many alternative people [who] use it in their very own way,” she said.

For Delafontaine, collaborating with creatives of all artistic walks is about “someone with a specialty of view, a robust universe [taking] the Pliage [bag range] some place else,” she said.

Amongst these directions were an origami-based capsule with Tokyo-based design studio Nendo that challenged the well-known tote bag’s shape; designs that were “very pop and with a humorousness” imagined with Jeremy Scott, and turning Longchamp totes into “a chunk of wall on the street” by dressing them through a collaboration with graffiti artist André Saraiva.

Priced between $175 and $390, the Longchamp x D’heygere capsule collection will launch on Jan. 3 on the French brand’s website and choose retail locations globally. In Paris, a dedicated pop-up will take pride of place in Lonchamp’s Saint-Honoré flagship store.