The Journal — real weddings by Joseba Sandoval

One of the least glamorous parts of my job is that I spend a great deal of time thinking about surfaces. Not about people, not about light, about surfaces. What a fabric does when the sun moves. Whether a shoe will read as black or as a hole in the frame. Whether the thing a bride is holding in her hands is going to sit quietly in the photograph or fight everything around it.

 

Accessories are where this gets decided, and almost nobody plans for it. So I want to write about a small Spanish house I came across called Vega Cárcer, partly because their story is lovely and partly because their approach happens to explain something useful about how objects behave in front of a camera.

 

TWO SISTERS AND A HABIT

 

Vega Cárcer is run by two sisters, Valvanuz and Mónica Abascal, and it began in the way the best small businesses tend to begin, which is by accident and out of a habit.

 

They had been making their own bags since they were girls. Every time they came back to Spain, friends would ask them to make one too. That went on long enough that in 2010 they stopped treating it as a favour and started treating it as a house.

 

What they make is crocodile leather, entirely by hand, and entirely to order. The pieces are produced in Colombia and finished for each client individually. You choose the colour, the shape, the size, the hardware, the lining and the detailing, and then you wait. A finished bag takes two to three months.

 

I like that timeline enormously, and not for romantic reasons. Two to three months is almost exactly the window between the moment most couples finalise the dress and the wedding itself. Which means that unlike almost every other accessory decision, this one has to be made early and cannot be fixed the week before. That forces a kind of thinking that usually improves everything else.

 

THE PART THAT MATTERS TO A PHOTOGRAPHER: THE FINISH

 

Here is the detail that made me want to write this. They offer four finishes, and they are listed plainly on their own technical sheet: gloss, matte, waxed and metallic.

 

To most people that is a taste question. To anybody holding a camera it is a completely different object in four versions, and I would genuinely encourage you to think about it before you think about colour.

 

Gloss is the most dramatic and the least forgiving. Crocodile is already a pattern of raised scales, and a gloss finish puts a small bright highlight on every single one of them. In soft, overcast light this is spectacular, it is the finish that photographs like jewellery. In hard midday sun, or under a photographer’s flash, it becomes a field of tiny white dots and the shape of the bag disappears underneath them.

 

Matte does the opposite. It reads as texture rather than shine, it holds its colour honestly in almost any light, and it never blows out. It is, if I am being practical rather than poetic, the finish I would choose for a wedding, because a wedding is not a controlled studio and you do not get to decide what the sun does at four in the afternoon.

 

The waxed finish sits between the two and is the one that ages most beautifully, which is worth saying out loud, because it means it will look better in the photographs your daughter takes of it than in mine.

 

Metallic is the specialist. It is extraordinary in the evening, under warm artificial light, and it is very difficult to control outdoors. If the reception is indoors and lit with candles and tungsten, it will be the most photographed object in the room.

 

THEIR CARE NOTES ARE BETTER THAN MOST

 

Something I noticed on their site, and which I have never seen a fashion brand do this bluntly, is that they publish a short list of instructions for keeping the leather alive. It is four lines long and there is not a word of marketing in it:

 

Do not leave it in the sun for long periods, because sunlight bleaches the finish. If it gets wet, let it dry naturally and never with hot air. To keep the shine, wipe it with a dry white cotton cloth. And do not put creams on it, because creams ruin the finishes, particularly the gloss and the metallic.

 

That last one is the one everybody gets wrong. The instinct with any leather is to feed it something, and with a finished exotic skin that instinct is exactly backwards. I have watched more than one beautiful object be destroyed with kindness.

 

WHAT I ACTUALLY TELL COUPLES

 

I am not in the business of telling anybody what to buy, and a bespoke crocodile bag is not a small purchase or a universal one. But the underlying principle applies at every budget, and it is this.

 

Choose accessories for how they behave, not for how they look on a table. A shoe, a bag, a hair comb and a pair of earrings are the four objects that will appear in more of your photographs than any other detail of the day, and three of them are usually decided in the last fortnight, in a hurry, under fluorescent shop lighting, which is the one lighting condition that will never occur again.

 

Take the thing outside. Look at it in daylight. Look at it in shade. Turn it. If it changes character completely between those three, it will change character completely during your day as well.

 

And if you are going to commission something that takes three months to make, start now.