Designer Diego Rocha

Posted on Sunday, June 12

Story and Photos by Olivia Castañeda
Olivia-Nathania@sbcglobal.net

There is an intimate studio in the Gold Coast area where the creations of high-quality, custom-made handbags occur daily.  Located at 1050 N. State St., designer Diego Rocha brings his ideas to life using exotic skins only, such as python, crocodile and ostrich.  He can be found in the back room of the studio, diligently working while listening to music.

After five years of hard work, Rocha’s talent landed him as a finalist in The Fifth Annual Independent Handbag Designer Awards presented by InStyle and Handbag Designer 101.  His Baby Jane bag was selected from over 1,000 others.  The winner will be announced on June 15^th.

You can vote at http://news.instyle.com/photo-gallery/?postgallery=54978#14.

“It’s a compliment, for someone who was self-taught on how to do everything,” Rocha says.  He then chuckles.

The 36-year-old designer was born and raised in Sao Paulo, Brazil where he was exposed to fashion at an early age.  His mother was a patternmaker for Brazilian designers Clodovil Hernandez, Conrado Segreto and Reinaldo Lourenco.  Growing up, while mother worked, Rocha sat nearby doing his homework.  “It was not something that I really caught attention to.  I was busy with school,” he says.  Rocha became an accountant and landed a job in New York in 2002.  “It’s hard to say that you can be bored in New York, but I was.”  To keep busy, he began a hobby of experimenting with leathers and pieces of fabric and sewing.  He studied and learned how to put together different materials to create handbags during a six-month period in his apartment, according to his website at www.diegorocha.net.  Studying and knowing different fabrics and the construction of this art is his advice to any student designer.  “I mean you can tell your seamstress or patternmaker how you want your stuff, but how if you don’t understand the materials?”

Because Rocha learned to think and make fashion solo, he considers himself old-school like the great masters Christian Dior and Cristobal Balenciaga.  After selling his first bag at $60 and seeing how happy the client was, he turned his hobby into a profession, trading it in for accounting.  Rocha chose to settle in Chicago to start his business in 2005, to be near his 38-year-old sister Lu.  “We are very close.  It was nice to be out of [Brazil] and have part of the family here,” he says.  He shares his success with his sister and friends, some of which are his closest clients.

Rocha’s clientele can be described as a woman 40 years old and up, 5 feet 5 inches tall, who is well-established and has sent her kids to college.  “It’s a niche.  I specialize in these women,” he says.  The handbags start at $480 to $3,000.  Each bag comes with a matching hand cuff sold separately, starting at $85 to $120.  He makes each client feel special by custom-making a bag for them, rather than selling one straight off the shelf.  He makes a pattern and when the client comes in he reads them to get a sense of their lifestyle and makes the bag fit their needs.  “It’s not that hard to make a bag.  I dare anybody to try,” he says with a half smile.

The Baby Jane bag took a day to make.  It was first introduced to the market in 2008, and is still his best seller.  The inspiration for the bag comes from the “glamour of old Hollywood in the mid 1940s.”  The contemporary touch Rocha gives it is the clean lines and lack of embellishments.  “It’s very clean and classy.”

Every season Rocha updates the collections.  For the fall, Baby Jane will be made with a combination of crocodile and python skins in purple, gray or charcoal color.  He is working with a jewelry designer to embellish the bag with hardware, and small, golden crocodile feet will be the feet of the bag.  Rocha is still working on the prototypes and is very excited for the finished product.  Sounds like another best seller in the making.