An Evening with Giuseppe Santoni — Filming the Pluto Bag Debut in New York

There is a particular quality to an evening that hasn’t tried too hard. No excess, no performance — just a room of people who know exactly what they’re looking at, and a house confident enough to let the objects speak. That was the atmosphere when Santoni hosted an intimate gathering at their New York boutique to introduce the Pluto bag — the Italian house’s first foray into handbags, and a natural extension of the same philosophy that has governed their making since 1975. Giuseppe Santoni was there. I was there with my camera, over the course of an evening that became two films. The Pluto is a bag built on restraint. A flap silhouette derived from Santoni’s signature double-buckle, a wood frame molded entirely by hand, a gold edge detail that is precise without being decorative for its own sake. It comes in Midnight, Cherry, Amber, and Candy — a palette as considered as the construction. Filming it meant finding the angle that showed the proportion honestly, letting the form do what it does in the right light, not rushing it. Giuseppe Santoni moved through the evening the way founders of old houses tend to — unhurried, genuinely present in conversation. Fashion guests gathered, glasses in hand, the kind of crowd for whom this sort of evening is both professional and personal. The Pluto bag circulated through the room on its own terms. I approached the night as two separate films on purpose. The first is wider — the atmosphere of the event, the room, the light, the rhythm of people moving through a space they’re discovering. The second goes closer: the bag in detail, hands, faces, the quieter moments that don’t photograph as headlines but are almost always where the real story sits. Together they give the evening more surface than a single edit could.