Motley
The Metallic bags, designed by Ayzit Bostan (image: Fabian Frinzel).
There’s something incongruous about Ayzit Bostan’s Metallic bag. It’s a straightforward tote with clean lines and no embellishment, making for a design that is perfectly utilitarian. “A small bag, but it holds a lot,” the designer explains. But the bag’s fabric? Well, the fabric is pure party.
Metallic fabrics have an appeal that is difficult to capture. They shimmer and glint, draping into deep shadows and crests of light. As fabrics, they’re all ornament – colour and decoration woven into form – which makes it curious that Bostan picked them. Not that there’s anything wrong with ornament, but it’s easy to imagine fabrics as exuberant as these having been cut into a more ostentatious bag. Yet Bostan is clear in her ambitions. “The bag shows the fabric very purely,” she says. “There’s no design, because the colours are mega beautiful. And a little bit kitsch as well.”
The bags are made from two-tone jersey – the outer fabric made from polyester and elastane, the lining from acetate. It is not a fabric that Bostan says she would work with regularly. “It’s nothing special and these types of fabric are not really sustainable,” she says, “but they’re nice for an object.”
However, the textile’s fabulousness disguises the story of thrift that lurks behind the design. Bostan’s bags have been produced from leftover fabrics used for Top, a design that she created for the Textile Worlds exhibition at Munich’s Die Neue Sammlung design museum. The commission had come about when Bostan was visited by the museum’s director, Angelika Nollert, who took a shine to a particular object in her studio. “A small ball,” Bostan notes, “that I had won at a fairground in Italy. She told me I should make a really huge one for the exhibition.”
Top, made from patches of metallic fabric in imitation of the carnival-esque original, is 2m in diameter. “Angelika tells me that whenever she’s in a bad mood, she goes to the ball to cheer [herself] up,” Bostan quips. But given the scale and construction of the exhibition piece, a large quantity of material remained unused. “So I had the idea to make some bags, because the fabrics are just so colourful,” Bostan says. “They put you in a good mood whenever you see them.”
Bostan’s design may be outwardly glamorous, but it is grounded in responsible use of material. Exhibition design is a notoriously wasteful field, and Bostan has mitigated that by converting leftover textiles into small-scale accessories. These are patchwork designs, using up the remnants of material that would otherwise go to waste. The complete set forms a harlequin’s motley of colourful cuboids – granny smith green, burnt orange and plum purple – every bit as technicolour-gorgeous as this suggests. Because responsible stewardship of materials doesn’t need to be boring – utilising materials that would otherwise go to waste can be giddy, disco, glitzy and fun. Bostan’s bags are a case in point. They are gleaming gems, formed from the pressure of using up what would otherwise be left behind.
Words Oli Stratford
Photographs Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #36. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.