Chanel Classic Flap Bag

The Classic Flap is a rectangular shoulder bag of black lambskin, stitched all over in a diamond quilt that pads the soft leather and gives it shape. A full-width flap folds down over the front and closes on a small tab carrying the lock: two interlaced Cs in gold-tone metal that turn to open. The strap is a gold-tone chain threaded with a ribbon of leather, passed through eyelets at the sides so that it can hang long or be doubled on the shoulder. The medium size, reference A01112, measures about 25.5 by 15.5 centimetres.

It is a reworking, not an original. In February 1955 Gabrielle Chanel presented a quilted bag on a chain, named 2.55 after the month and year of its launch, which closed with a rectangular clasp the house calls the Mademoiselle lock. After her death in 1971 the house went through a lull, and the French Wikipedia says the bag spent several years in the shadows before it was found again in the archives.

Karl Lagerfeld took charge of Chanel in 1983, and most accounts date his version of the bag to that year, though one puts it as late as 1988. His changes were small but decisive. He replaced the Mademoiselle lock with the interlocking Cs, which the original had never carried, and wove leather through the chain. The bag was sold as the Classic, or Timeless, flap until 2021, when Chanel renamed it the 11.12 after the style code of the medium size.

The two bags now sit side by side. In 2005, for the fiftieth anniversary, Chanel reissued the 1955 design with its rectangular lock, and that Reissue is a separate article. The Classic Flap has stayed in the range throughout, in a growing number of sizes and leathers. Sotheby's describes each one as made at Chanel's leather workshops in Verneuil-en-Halatte, north of Paris, in some 180 operations over as much as fifteen hours, and Chanel sells it through its own boutiques.