Valextra’s Founder Fontana: The Original Mobile Man
Meet the man behind the brand.
Giovanni Fontana isn’t a name you hear very much; much like the brand and the handbags he was interested in creating, Valextra’s founder was discreet and discerning. He was, however, a quiet force to be reckoned with.
Born in the early 1900s, Fontana’s career as a leather goods agent taught him about the importance of efficiency when it came to luggage from a young age, while his work travels across Europe – which took him to Vienna and Paris in the 1930s – gave him an appreciation for the elegance of haute couture that he was observing gain momentum. When he returned to Italy full time and decided to start Valextra in 1937 in Milan, the two notions combined from day one.
A man of many ideas, but not necessarily with the means to make leather goods, Fontana enlisted his friend Lucio “Gino” Mosca to collaborate on his creations. Intent on making functional handbags which fulfilled a purpose, Fontana would spend hours watching passers-by from their studio-meets-boutique on Via San Babila, sketching and making prototypes as they went along and constantly adapting and refining.
As a result, the handbags they engineered gave practicality a new provenance, one that came to form the concept of the present continuous and ensured their designs were always relevant, always timely and always desirable.
Over the following decades, Fontana expanded Valextra’s influence by catering to lifestyles that were increasingly mobile, adapting his designs with agility based on what he was witnessing on the street and placing it in an inimitable Milanese context by capturing the tension between the city’s sobriety and splendour.
In 1954, the Ventiquattro Ore briefcase was awarded the first Compasso d’Oro of La Rinascente (which celebrates the best examples of function and refinement); in 1958 the Tallone coin purse was patented, setting the standard for small leather goods to be ergonomic as well as elegant; in 1961, the Soft Avietta Travel Bag - fondly known as the 48-hour bag thanks to its overnight capacity - raised the bar for elevated luggage; and in 1968, Fontana’s most famous creation of all, the Tric Trac, was launched to meet the needs of men on the move and became an icon of 20th Century design.
Nearly a century later, Fontana’s concept continues to permeate through all Valextra’s designs - from our multi-functional Bum Bag to all our small leather goods - which remain ever-contemporary objects of everyday desire for people who, like Fontana was, are always on the move.