On a cloudy Sunday morning in October, Craig Wright was at the Tuileries Garden in Paris for Premiere Classe, a twice-annual accessories trade show held around the time of Paris Fashion Week.
“We don’t really need to do these shows anymore, but it’s good for people to see us and see what we are up to,” Mr. Wright said. He was speaking about his brand Dragon Diffusion, which has had a presence at Premiere Classe for about a quarter-century.
Throughout the trade show, the Dragon Diffusion stall was visited by buyers from stores around the world, like Hug, a Chinese boutique with locations in Chengdu, Shenzhen and Aranya, and Halo Shoes, in Portland, Ore. They had come to see the latest woven-leather bag, shoe and belt designs developed by Mr. Wright and made by artisan weavers employed by him in India.
One of the first places to carry Dragon Diffusion in America was Lost & Found, a store with locations in Los Angeles and Santa Monica, Calif. Its owner, Jamie Rosenthal, has been selling the products for two decades. She was “gobsmacked,” she said, by the number of woven Dragon Diffusion creations she saw out and about in Paris this year — a phenomenon also observed by local publications like Le Figaro. “I saw so many girls with the bags in the metro, on the street,” Ms. Rosenthal said.
It was an ascendant moment for a brand that has long had a cult following, thanks partly to its associations with Ashley Olsen and other discerning people who have carried the bags, which typically cost between $400 and $600. The model Ella Richards, 29, is among them. “It’s like Bottega,” Ms. Richards said of the way Dragon Diffusion’s woven handbags resemble the intrecciato designs from Bottega Veneta. “I think they’re chicer than Bottega,” she added.
As Ms. Rosenthal put it, Dragon Diffusion was “if-you-know-you-know for a long time.”
The same could be said for Mr. Wright, 67, who over the years has quietly earned a reputation as a leather goods whisperer. As he has grown Dragon Diffusion, he has also done leather and weaving work for various labels: 45R, Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Loewe, Prada — even Bottega Veneta.
About 60 percent of Mr. Wright’s work is for brands that are not his own, he said. It’s a reason he doesn’t like to give interviews, preferring to stay “very much underground,” as he put it.
Another reason Mr. Wright has resisted giving interviews, he said, was advice he received from Frances Stein, a fashion editor turned accessories designer for brands including Chanel: “Don’t spend money on press agents or publicity. The bags will sell themselves.”
Mr. Wright has been working with hides since adolescence, he said. Born in Christchurch, New Zealand, he was raised in nearby Kaikoura by his maternal grandmother, who he said was Indigenous Māori. In his teens and early 20s, he worked the 4 a.m. to 10 a.m. shift at a local sheepskin tannery, where, he said, he would sometimes snooze on shearling skins used as material for Ugg boots.
An avid surfer, he spent as much of his spare time as he could in or near the water. “‘Do you think you’re going to be sailing and surfing forever?’” Mr. Wright recalled being asked by his father back then.
Mr. Wright’s daughter, Jane Wright, a 29-year-old designer at Zara Home, said he is still very much a “shy surfer bro” at heart.
In his mid 20s, Mr. Wright came to the United States. He found work developing leather goods, like a braided belt made of a single leather strip. He continued working with leather, in America and Europe, establishing Dragon Diffusion in Belgium in 1988 — a year that coincided with the lunar calendar’s year of the dragon.
Mr. Wright started Dragon Diffusion in Belgium after he had found a sort of mentor there in Ivan Kadic, an engineer who had invented specialized machines for producing woven leather goods. Mr. Kadic, who died in 2010, brought Mr. Wright to factories in Chennai, India, an area renowned for its leather industry.
Mr. Wright is now the majority owner of a factory in Ranipet, India, about a three-hour drive from Chennai. Called AB Global, it is where Dragon Diffusion bags are made, a process that involves machinery invented by Mr. Kadic. Mr. Wright, who lives in Brussels, spends about four months a year in India, he said. He otherwise works mostly at Dragon Diffusion’s headquarters in Belgium. This summer, the company moved from a location in Brussels to a much larger space outside the city.
The recent surge of interest in Dragon Diffusion came years after Mr. Wright started bringing his knowledge of, and relationships with, Indian leather factories to other European labels, like Hermès. In the mid-1990s, he helped develop woven place mats for the French luxury brand, along with the Ahmedabad bag, a machine-woven tote made of leather and polyester cord.
Corinne Poux-Bernard, who worked at Hermès from 1992 to 2012, in positions overseeing bag and luggage design, said that Mr. Wright showed an “ambidexterity” for leather work done both by hand and with machines.
Vincent du Sartel, who has held design positions at Loewe and Louis Vuitton, shared similar sentiments. “He’s someone with whom I love to speak about how to build a bag, or how to treat a thread,” Mr. du Sartel said about Mr. Wright, whom he has known since the 2000s.
In recent years, Ms. Poux-Bernard, who is now a brand adviser, helped make an e-commerce site for Dragon Diffusion, something Mr. Wright had resisted until the Covid pandemic. She recalled pushing him to include more of his back story on the site. “But he is stubborn,” she said with a laugh.
Dragon Diffusion bags typically begin as life-size sketches drawn by Mr. Wright on big sheets of paper. Many of their shapes and weaves are rooted in global basketry traditions. A point is for them to show their craft.
The brand’s Māori Kete bag, Mr. Wright said, was inspired by the kete baskets woven with flax and sedge plants by Indigenous Māori on mainland New Zealand. (His Māori grandmother used a kete to collect seashells, he added.)
A basket made of interwoven banana leaves was the basis for Dragon Diffusion’s Inside-Out bag. (The style’s prototype was developed for Hermès, which did not use it, Ms. Poux-Bernard said.) Mr. Wright bought the basket at a market in the Mariana Islands, while sailing from Australia to Japan. “There was a lady selling vegetables at the market and I asked her if I could buy the panier, not the vegetables,” he said, using the French word for basket.
The rattan cane work of Thonet cafe chairs inspired the weave of another Dragon Diffusion bag, called the Eclipse. Its body comprises leather strips of slightly different thicknesses. “Optically, it makes all the difference,” Mr. Wright said. He was speaking at his office in Belgium, which was decorated with some of the hundreds of baskets that he has collected over his decades of traveling the globe.
Most Dragon Diffusion bags are made with water buffalo leather from the northern Indian state of Punjab. Goat, sheep and cow skins are also used. Leathers are often vegetable-tanned, cut into strips, dyed, then dried (preferably in the sun). Afterward, the leather strips are waxed and treated with heat “to ensure color fastness and to nourish the leather,” Mr. Wright said.
The AB Global factory employs about 700 weavers, Mr. Wright said, who together handle about 43 miles of leather strips a day. They hand-weave bags on wooden lasts made for the factory by a pair of carpenters. Another team of about 275 artisans, known as attachers, finish the bags.
With many hands involved, if each bag is not an exact replica of the other, the better for it, Mr. Wright said. “What I strive for is imperfection — that’s what you want from handicraft.”
For the past decade or so, a last step has been sewing a penny-size medal of Saint Christopher — a patron saint of travelers, sailors and surfers — into each bag. Mr. Wright started adding in the medals around 2010, after picking one up as a souvenir. They have been a source of surprising “fan email,” he said.
Dragon Diffusion’s most popular bag is a style called the Santa Croce, which has a weave that took six months to perfect, Mr. Wright said. Were it not for help from a weaver named Selvam, Mr. Wright added, whom he has been working with for 30 years, he might never have figured out the design.
“Selvam solved the thing by free-handing it,” Mr. Wright said.
Some products hold special significance for Mr. Wright: The Māori Kete bag, he said, along with the Octo Multi, a bag made using a knotting technique that involves combining leftover leather strips in as many as 14 different colors. It was conceived by a weaver named Shweta, and he still has the prototype design at his office.
“I always bring it to the trade shows,” he said, holding up the prototype bag woven with black, brown, pink, blue, yellow and other leathers.
“It’s my good luck bag,” Mr. Wright added. “But my favorite bag is the next one — whether it’s for Dragon or someone else.”
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