Keyhole Card Holder — Silver

Elsa Schiaparelli drew the keyhole in the 1930s as a handbag clasp, chosen because a lock implies something worth hiding — an everyday object handed an aura of mystery. It has been a house code ever since, surfacing as buttons, clasps, jewellery and pockets across nine decades. Daniel Roseberry's Schiaparelli made it literal again, casting the lock in hammered brass and applying it to leather goods as an object rather than a motif, so it sits proud of the surface instead of being stamped into it.

This is the Keyhole Card Holder in mirror-finish silver laminated calfskin, a surface that throws light rather than absorbing it and makes the gilt brass read warm against it. The lock plaque is hammered by hand, so no two catch the light identically, and it sits square at the centre of the front panel. Four card slots run across the exterior, two to a side, with a central pocket for notes between them. The interior is lined in the house's Shocking Pink lambskin, the colour Elsa Schiaparelli trademarked in 1937. The reverse carries 21 Place Vendôme, Paris and the Schiaparelli signature embossed in gold. Made in Italy.

It reads as a piece of jewellery that happens to hold cards — the brass does the work a logo would do elsewhere, and the mirrored silver refuses to behave like a neutral. The kind of object that gets noticed the moment it leaves a pocket, which is rather the point of putting a lock on something this small.