Introduction
Johnny Coca is a Spanish accessories designer whose career includes senior roles at Celine, Mulberry, Saint Laurent and Louis Vuitton. During Phoebe Philo’s Celine tenure he led accessories design, directing the development of bags and shoes inside the London-centred studio system.
Coca’s team helped translate Celine’s reduced ready-to-wear into functional leather goods, including the wide-gusset Trapeze bag. He left in 2014 to become creative director of Mulberry, later returning to specialist leather-goods roles at major Paris houses. His trajectory shows how accessories authorship can move between studio leadership and overall creative direction.
Design ethos
Coca approaches accessories through construction and movement. Handles, gussets, closures and the relation between rigid and soft leather give a bag its character before ornament is added.
At Celine, this produced objects that were immediately legible yet adaptable in use: clear geometries opened through wings, straps or expanding bodies. The work treats hardware and proportion as functional architecture, allowing a commercial object to retain the discipline of the wider collection.
Disclaimer
Career history
2010
Johnny Coca led accessories design within Phoebe Philo’s Celine, directing teams responsible for bags and shoes and helping develop the Trapeze. His departure for Mulberry in 2014 carried the house’s accessory expertise into a wider creative-director career.
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