Like hot meets cold, the new Freitag Reference line is the meltdown of neo and retro: on one hand inspired by horse messengers of the 1800s, on the other hand initiated and endorsed by contemporary journalists.Messenger comes from message; and today, the media are the horse that carries him. A new chapter in the Freitag book. The new cover story for the Freitag press. A Freitag bag like you’ve never seen.
Freitag Reference bags are still used, still made from truck tarps that have spent their first life on the road. what is new is they are not hip. They are not pop. They are not ironic, not post-modern or post-anything else. ReFeRence bags are fucking serious.
The style ReFeRence for the new line is that of military and civilian messengers of the 1800’s. The shapes, the buckles and the unicoloredlookofthetarpsareclassicto the bone. The personal ReFeRence goes to «the other messengers», reporters and journalists: independent, critical, investiga- tive and sometimes daring. The functional ReFeRence for the new line is that of the contemporary urban brainworker, female and male. compartments fit laptops, not parchment. intelligent short-cut flaps and buttons deliberately make the beautiful truck-back buckles mostly redundant. The FReiTAG ReFeRence finally lies in the tarps: the touch, the smell, the thousands of miles of history that every bag brings to its owner’s shoulder; and it lies in the Swiss quality and durability which has always made buying a second FReiTAG bag an act of free will rather than a necessity.
The new FREITAG REFERENCE line may not boast blatant individuality, but for the connaisseur, every REFERENCE bag is unique in the tarp’s texture, tone and most importantly story. These tarps were on the road all their life, before FREITAG gave them a next one. They refer to this as R.I.P. – Recycled Individual Products.
