It is Monday. The wind moved the clouds without telling them where. Sometimes that is how a road begins, with a changed sky.
How my bags are born, where they come from, stays a mystery to me too. Some start from a poem. Some from a film. Some from scraps of lived life, some from a dare. And since anything you can imagine can also be made, all that is left is the technical part.
I very rarely work to order. So I very rarely know where a bag of mine ends up.
The workshop
I put the leather on the table and cut without a pattern. Or I paint on a piece of leather, and when the painting is finished I see what shape it wants. I rarely have it in mind from the start.
I never say a bag is mine. I am only a go-between. The bag asks for itself.
The workshop is an oasis of quiet. No strangers come in here, and no thoughts from outside. If I forget to leave them at the door, I cannot connect with the work and I ruin it. I have learned not to force. To let everything run, and to join its flow.
Letting them go took me a long time
At first I looked at them with a selfishness that was out of the ordinary. I wanted all of them.
Now my greatest joy is to let them fly. To let them start their way through the world, like children leaving home.
Copiii cresc și unii se despart / de cei ce le-au dat viață din durere. / Plecările din tine-n alte lumi, / să nu le iei nicicând drept despărțire.
Nicolae LabișChildren grow, and some will part from those who gave them life through pain. The leavings out of you into other worlds - never take them for a farewell.
Every so often a photograph arrives. Or a few lines. That is when I feel the greatest fulfilment. I know the feeling behind every bag, I remember the state I was in, and I live the making of it again.
What follows are some of them. I have none of them any more.
The ones that asked for patience
For the first one I wanted something out of the ordinary. I love traditional motifs. I love an old traditional blouse, embroidered with such patience, and I run my fingertips over the place where the needle went in a thousand times, like a silent prayer through the cloth. I wanted that same patience in leather. Not machine-stitched, by the dozen, but the needle put into every single hole by hand.
I loved how complicated it was. I remember my fingers were frayed. But the satisfaction of having made exactly what I wanted blunted every stitch.
It went to someone as distinguished as it is.
This one I will remember for as long as I work, and after.
It was a commission with a single requirement: a bag for an event, in two shades the client chose. Navy and yellow. The client, one of the most refined people I know. And the leather, completely wrong for anything I wanted to do with it - chrome-tanned, lambskin with no structure, nothing I could work over the top of.
It is the only time in all these years that I stopped three times. I gave up on it and started something else. Except something in me would not let me, and I kept going back.
It was the hardest-born bag I have made. When I finally drove off the thought of giving up and let it run, it settled beautifully. It is one of the most beautiful ones.
The first and only one I made from a pattern. It looked so complicated that I could not resist making it. Every hour of it was a pleasure.
The ones that made me laugh
Sometimes the playful side comes out hard. This is a unicorn who tried to give up on life and did not quite manage it. I am an optimist, after all.
Painting her face amused me enormously.
Seinfeld is a show about nothing. That is exactly why I loved it.
Kramer does not knock. He does not enter a room - he happens in it. I caught him in that exact instant: mouth open, hair already ahead of him.
I like people who do not apologise for being what they are.
And now someone carries on her shoulder a man who never once asked permission.
Ordinariness bores me. What people will say. "That is how it is done."
I like people who are alive, who live. Who have life in their eyes. Who have courage. Who are beautiful through their lives and their character. I cannot imagine anyone else carrying this one than the woman it went to.
The ones that hide something
The things that truly matter are never on display. They belong to you alone, to your eyes alone. Only you know about them.
The spectacle is on the inside. From the outside it is an unremarkable man's bag.
A table in a restaurant, and resting on it, a bag. To everyone else it is somewhere to put your things.
On its flap there is a photograph transferred onto leather, of its owner's son. Think what it must be to see the face of the person you love most in the world, on your way out into the jungle.
Here I had a real problem. A trip was waiting for me, to a place I had dreamed of for a long time, and I had thought up a bag you wear - a waistcoat. It goes on either way round, it has about seven pockets plus a belt pouch, enough to walk about free without carrying anything.
That one was harder to part with. But when I saw who it was going to, I was glad.
The ones that say nothing, and are right not to
Sometimes a bag does not need to say anything. Rarely, in my opinion. It needs to let femininity and delicacy have the last word. Simple pink.
In the years I have spent in the workshop, one of my preoccupations has been form. How far can you reinvent a square? The thought of trespassing against straight lines has followed me the whole time. Fluidity. Flight.
In time, looking at a person, I know what suits them. I knew the moment I first saw her that this one was made for her.
This belt was pure joy. And the wine was good.
The marvel of a woman who wears it kept me company through the making of it, in the workshop. It was the first time I let anyone sit beside me while I work.
The ones that went far
It is astonishing that a lady mosquito managed to fly as far as Greece. Just as astonishing was meeting the person who carries her.
Another went walking through Venice. It has "No More Drama" painted on it, which struck me as the right thing to carry through that city.
And one I left for last
I wanted to close the workshop.
When I had made the decision, on the way home, stopped at a traffic light, I had a revelation. I saw eleven bags with masks. Me. Every one of us, at certain moments of our lives.
About that line - twelve bags with masks, which I have called My Last Supper - I will write separately.
For now, the workshop is open.
Every piece exists only once. When it sells, that exact piece leaves the workshop and moves to the Archive. So its page no longer says much about it. Here is where they stay.
If you own a bag of mine, send me a photograph of it. It does not have to be a good one. I only want to know where it ended up.
