As the lore goes and he recounts, Ghesquière was working on a motorcycle-inspired bag in 2000 when Moss saw a version and showed interest in it. He gave her one and offered others to his inner circle—women like Marie-Amélie Sauvé, Carine Roitfeld, and Emmanuelle Alt—initially calling it Le Lariat, then Le Motorcycle. Le First and Le City followed based on their sizes, until eventually, the latter stuck for the entire family.

The 3,000-square-meter temperature- and humidity-controlled space is filled not only with the kind of heaving mobile shelving units found in institutional archives, but also the storage of patrimonial furniture, Cristobal’s actual library, and two stunning paintings positioned upright (one is by Bernard Buffet of his wife, Annabel, wearing a pink Balenciaga gown; the other, surprisingly, is of Gabrielle Chanel in a soigné white ensemble by A.M. Cassandre).

Of course, we end up over at the units stacked with Le City models, never carried and originating from the workshops. You need not be prone to It-bag lust to marvel over the sheer number and variety—some 879 at last count. Dream of a shade and it’s probably in the mix. There are evolutions and iterations: the burnished studs that morphed to resemble thimbles; the brogue trims that evoked Derby shoes; the metal hardware; the Part Time with its seam down the middle or the square Velo format (presumably to fit inside a bicycle basket).

So how, in De Massé’s mind, has Le City remained such a hero piece? “I think it’s extremely identifiable, and because of that, it doesn’t really feel like taking a risk,” he says. “You know that you’re buying this particular bag for a specific reason; and undoubtedly, part of that reason is that you’re joining all those other people who already own one. There’s something of a community spirit around it; it’s not an exclusively ultra-luxury community, nor is it mass market. It occupies this interesting space somewhere in between.”