Tina Lutz Morris has lived in many places around the world. In southern Germany, where she grew up, in Paris to study, as a fashion designer first in Tokyo, then in New York before moving to Berlin in 2014. On this sunny afternoon we meet her at her last stop for the time being: Milan.
She is sitting in a showroom with her bag collection during Fashion Week. However, she and her family did not move to the northern Italian fashion metropolis because of a job offer. “We wanted to go somewhere warmer,” she says in a low voice. She originally wanted to move back to New York with her husband, who is American, and their son. But because of the high rents and the increase in violence and crime, they would have decided against it.
“And then we thought about it for a long time. When three of my best friends moved to Milan, we went to see the city.” She immediately found life here to be easier and less complicated. A step that was quite daring, because as international as Tina Lutz Morris actually is after more than 30 years abroad, her bags are completely German.
From New York to Berlin
Why this is so has more to do with chance than calculation. Lutz was originally only responsible for fashion as head designer at Calvin Klein in New York. Also, her own label, Lutz & Patmos in New York, was a women’s ready-to-wear line focused on luxury knitwear. She had nothing to do with accessories. That changed on her first Christmas in Berlin, when her husband gave her a leather wooden box with an old-fashioned metal frame. She then went in search of manufacturers who are still able to produce such metal frames. This started a process that resulted in the bag brand Lutz Morris – a combination of her last name and that of her husband.
German specialty: The metal frames come from a company that has been around since 1860.
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Image: Lutz Morris
Today, the metal frame is the hallmark of their bags, which have little in common with the mass-produced goods of other luxury manufacturers. “I said to myself: If I build a company from scratch again, then it just has to have a heart and a soul,” says Lutz Morris. She could have had the bags produced abroad cheaper and still sold them for the same price, she says. But she chose to work with small manufacturers in Germany.
But first she had to learn what makes a bag. “I felt like a chef who first had to gather all the ingredients,” she recalls. She sees that as an advantage today, because you can question things better if you come from outside. She dealt with leather and its various tanning processes. She found manufactories that had long been forgotten. And she focused on a topic that the big manufacturers of luxury bags could not deliver: sustainability. This is already evident from the fact that her bag collection, which she launched in 2018, is not subject to trends, so you can wear it for years and decades. It also offers a repair service if something has broken on the bag.