Long-Time Favourite Luggage of The Duchess of Cambridge

Owners of Tusting bags will often come to think of their bag as a friend, a partner in crime perhaps, and this is never better illustrated than when a very tired bag is sent into us for repair. We’ll occasionally wonder if that customer wouldn’t really be better off with a new bag – but it is usually abundantly clear that it is THEIR bag they want, not some shiny unknown stranger of a new bag. So that’s when we carefully take the bag apart and put it back together with new parts where they are needed most but leave the character of the bag as unchanged as possible. This may mean almost as much labour as the making of a new bag, and thus a fairly high proportion of the cost of one too, but then you can’t buy the life story of a bag. Occasionally a bag will be too far gone to repair – then we have to break the bad news to its owner, the leather workshop equivalent of when the doctor asks you to sit down before they tell you what’s coming… Not fun!

So we were especially pleased last week to see photos on Instagram and in the press of the Duchess of Cambridge heading to a helicopter for a ride home from London, carrying nothing more than her Olive Explorer holdall. We first saw photos of her with this bag way back in 2007, when she was still Kate Middleton, when it often accompanied her on a dash here or there around London. It’s been on family holidays since and basically just does what one of our holdalls would do for any normal family – be there, tough and faithful and up for any adventure going.

Another Tusting bag just doing its job and earning justifiable loyalty from its human!