Purse Construction : Vessels, Beads, and Two-Sided Molds
Follow @wip.ish on IG for accompanying images (Fig. 73 - 114).
@cultgaia recently showed up on my IG feed. For me, the fashion brand is most known for their “Ark” purse : a semi circular bag made out of bamboo “structural” beads (Fig. 73). Nowadays, they make it in every size (Fig. 74) and color (Fig. 75). However, the posts I was seeing were showing object-like acrylic vessels used as purses. I actually didn’t even know they were purses when I first saw them : I’m talking about Eos (Fig. 76), Tallulah (Fig. 77), Nidhia (Fig. 78), Phaedra (Fig. 79), Lumen (Fig. 80), and Pearl (Fig. 81). They have all of these in various colors from pink (Fig. 82) to emerald.
Having been looking a lot at acrylic lately, I was intrigued with how these might have been made. I should add that I find resin kind of fascinating because it’s one of the materials we can “easily” use as architecture students that can act as a “real” or “final” material vs a model material like foam or chipboard. In any case, while Cult Gaia has factories in China and Brazil, I have not been successful at finding any WIP-like images of their purses. [1] However, looking through the varied images of each object on their website, you can begin to see the smallest of details that hint at their assembly.
Take a look at Isla, for example (Fig. 83). Isla is a shallow box-like purse that has a hinging decorative clutch that keeps it closed via magnets (Fig 84). In my opinion, the purses are made from multiple complex two-sided molds (maybe they’re not, but you can certainly make them this way). I’m not sure if the cast resin is then “cleaned up” and details are post-milled that allow for placement of hardware (like hinges, magnets, and handles) or if these were already in the mold itself. Either way, you can begin to imagine how we might make similar constructions by :
1. Milling positive molds out of MDF stock or machinable wax (Fig. 85).
*This is always kind of confusing to me, but you basically want to mill the exact thing you ultimately want to receive as an object rather than mill a mold. Machining a mold to make a mold will allow you to make multiple re-usable molds rather than mill one mold that will eventually become worn and unusable.
**Another thing to keep in mind : If you are pouring a hard material - like concrete, plaster, or acrylic - you’re going to want to use a soft mold made out of rubber. If you are pouring a soft material - like rubber - you’re going to want a hard mold made out of machinable wax, MDF, or plaster. Basically : Never mix a hard mold and hard cast materials or a soft mold and soft cast materials. They will be near impossible to de-mold!
2. Prepare the mold : Sand it, shellac it. Repeat at least three times!
*You only need to do this if you are using a porous material like MDF. Sanding and shellac-ing will make the mold smooth and fill up any pores on the surface of the material - it will basically create a barrier between the mold and whatever you are pouring. If you skip this step, the rubber might latch onto the mold and be difficult to release when you de-mold.
3. Before you cast rubber, you’ll want to brush a thin layer of baby powder. This will help the mold release.
*Again, you only need to do this if you are using a porous material like MDF. If you use something like machinable wax, the wax is already smooth and will easily de-mold from the rubber.
4. Pour Rubber (I like Oomoo 25) to make a flexible negative mold (Fig. 86) that you’ll be able to re-use multiple times.
5. Cast resin (Fig. 87). A material like resin allows for multiple versions of this kind of thing : Is the resin clear or is it neon purple with flower aggregate (Fig. 88)?
The thought process of deconstructing a @cultgaia vessel momentarily reminds me of @susanalexandra’s bags (Fig. 89), which have a “construction system” of their own. However, these purses really are “handmade”. That is, instead of laboring over creating an intense mold-based fabrication process, the bags all use very common manufactured faceted beads that can be found in almost any color (thanks, Etsy), but the assembly is somewhat grueling, where each purse takes eight hours of active labor (vs waiting for the cast to dry) - and not just any labor. SA’s bags are made by migrant women who are well versed in the craft of intricate beading, which, in this case, is one of many traditional Asian crafts. SA first came across these women in NYC’s Chinatown (Fig. 90), and began to work with these artisans by commissioning custom designs via hand drawn sketches (Fig. 91):
I took a little post-it and sketched it out, picked all my colors and they said, “okay, come back next week.” I did and they had made the thing I designed, which was the watermelon bag. It was made so well and I put it on my Instagram and I’ve never had so much feedback on anything I’d made before. I decided I was going to sell them and I’ve never had such a big response. The bags were these big, happy, sparkly statements… After the first bag, I was like well what else can we do? I would paint little designs and every time I would text her a picture and she would make it. She was just able to take this vision and create it. It was just a matter of testing the boundaries of the craftsmanship. I tried to learn how to do it myself and it’s beyond complicated. It’s so intricate and Lisa [Deng] (Fig. 92) started making these when she was thirteen and now she’s in her forties so she’s been at it. She’s still the head of our production. [2]
The demand for SA bags began to skyrocket as the brand was picked up by stores like Opening Ceremony and Neiman Marcus, and Lisa’s team could understandably no longer handle production :
Enter: Syeda Sonda (Fig. 93), a Bangladeshi woman who moved to New York City with her husband in 2015. Growing up in Bangladesh, a neighbor taught Syeda how to make these beaded bags, as well as extravagant plastic-beaded chandeliers. Susan found Syeda’s resume online on career site @makersrow this past summer in an effort to keep things local. As Susan’s second production head, Syeda leads a team of 40 Bangladeshi women based in Queens. [3]
What initially caught Susan’s eyes in Lisa’s shop were these small beaded creations : “I was so transfixed. It was this tiny tiny room just packed with little creatures made out of beads. There were Sponge Bobs (Fig. 94) and Hello Kittys, and I just had this idea that I wanted to make something, too” [3]. The comment reminded me of How-To beading books I fawned over as a child every year at school book fairs, but there is a really visually similar beading craft in Mexico, which is what I thought these were originally based off of. I have a treasured beaded ring (Fig. 95) I bought at Coyoacán in Mexico City for maybe $10.00 that looks like a much smaller, more delicate (and more minimal) version of SA’s purses.
There are actually so many different kinds of beading crafts in many cultures, but the one I’m pointing to is called Huichol beading. Huichol beading is done by the Huichol people who are from the states of Jalisco, Durango, Zacatecas, and Nayarit in Mexico. The work is incredibly colorful and ranges from beaded wearable pieces, like my ring (though traditional Huichol pieces are much more colorful), to sculptures that are covered in beads with the help of a layer of sticky beeswax that holds them in place (Fig. 96). When looking for Huichol artists I came across @huicholamade, Katy Grable, who in addition to beautiful beaded work she makes herself had a really enlightening post about cultural appropriation. She writes :
Can I wear beaded earrings if I’m not Indigenous (Fig. 97)?
Yes. Supporting Indigenous artists is cultural appreciation - not appropriation. (Fig. 98)
What does cultural appropriation of beadwork look like? It looks like white womxn beading designs that are *Native inspired* and selling them for much more than what actual Natives can or do charge. It looks like stealing from a culture that is not your own and using it for personal gain or profit. It’s especially egregious when it’s culture stolen from people who are systematically oppressed for their culture (Fig. 99).
These earring are not considered regalia and they don’t have a sacred religious value or context. My culture is beautiful, celebrating it is an act of resistance in this world - and I love being able to decolonize myself through this craft and share that with people in the form of beadwork. Supporting me by buying my beadwork is more than just appreciation, its helping me to reclaim and reconnect. It was with money from commissions here that I was able to sign up for classes to learn Nahuatl, one of my traditional languages (Fig. 100).
@huicholamade’s work, which are primarily earrings, ranges from $30 - $80, where each pair might take 2 - 4 hours. She does other custom work like beautiful brimmed hats that start at $300. I mention the prices because she speaks a lot about her pricing throughout her Ig :
The truth is, people don’t want to pay Brown folks for their labor. People see our work as the cheaper option - less value, lower quality. That couldn’t be further from the truth. While I won’t be charging the obscene amounts I’ve seen white womxn charging for my culture [@huicholamade has seen work of her same size / type sold for $90 - $160], I’m not going to sell my work or my time short. And Brown girlfriends, if you’re reading this, you shouldn’t either.
To be clear, @huicholamade does not live off of this work, and it is also worth noting that she is self-taught via the internet (mostly Youtube). She says learning the craft of huichol beading has allowed her to connect to her indigenous identity : Her grandfather from Nayarit used to bead, but she never fully learned the craft from him. While she makes Huichol inspired designs (you can see the traditional colorful Huichol flower all over her Ig), she also sells her own designs - and sometimes she combines Huichol designs with her own (Fig. 101). Sites like @beadaholique have amazing videos on beading techniques like the “peyote stitch” (Fig. 102), which I believe is somewhat foundational in both the work of @huicholamade and @susanalexandram and I think its amazing that in this case how-to content can help reconnect someone to their identity. But this concept of origins, craft, and its worth vs its monetary price is important to consider :
In contrast, Susan Alexandra purses sell from $150 - $400, where each purse takes approximately 1 day (or 8 hours) to complete. The women ( in 2019 there were around ~70 employed ) who make SA purses have the ability to work from home and still raise their children. In an interview with Forbes, SA says :
The difficulty for them is that most of them don’t speak English so getting a job is pretty difficult and I feel like craft is a universal language so we don’t have to speak the same language and they are able to do exactly what I want from seeing it and communicating with art. A great deal of them have children and couldn’t find jobs. It’s an opportunity to gain employment for these women to be with their children and work on their own terms…Lisa [Deng] works with about eighteen ladies and Syedah [Sonda] works with about fifty ladies. I don’t think either of the ladies have other jobs and they get forty-hour workweeks where they make their own hours like millennials. [2]
I don’t know how much each SA employed woman gets paid per day, so it’s hard to say whether the pay is fair, especially when we begin to consider @huicholamade’s incredibly well written points about craft appropriation and fair pay, though in an interview with Lithium Magazine, SA says these women “set their prices for their work.” [4] Granted, SA doesn’t use any “Native inspired” designs, but SA does employ women who can make these purses via their own cultural craft.
In general, I’m made aware of how many important questions come up when we begin to look at how things are made and who they are made by : How much do materials cost, and how much is labor worth? These questions become increasingly complex when you begin to employ other people to make the things you design - even more so when you find yourself profiting off of a cultural craft that doesn’t necessarily belong to your own culture. While @hucholamade’s comments aren’t meant to be a blanket statement, it does seem like there is a right and wrong way to do this (?).
Susan Alexandra’s claim to fame is also maybe of interest, though. In addition to these purses, Alexandra makes jewelry. A lot of her jewelry today looks like her purses (Fig. 103), but as stated previously, she doesn’t make these herself. However, SA actually began by making her own jewelry (Fig. 104), and she began to gain traction as a designer by wearing her own creations. This led to her creating a website for her friends and family to purchase her jewelry, and she was eventually picked up by Henri Bendel who began to stock her creations :
I started taking metalwork classes in my free time, and I really liked it, but I was really bad at it. I would make really messy-looking jewelry—unwearable it was so messy. Metalwork is very precise, and I’m not good at precision, so to cover all of these messy lines, I would use enamel and create these very colorful, very different-looking finishes. I was just doing it for myself. I started wearing my jewelry that was very colorful, and it got people’s attention. I put up a website of my jewelry for my friends in case they were interested.. My first pieces were rings and bracelets. Henri Bendel reached out to me and were like, ‘We want to carry your collection,’ and I think I cried because it was such a dream. That’s how it started—it was really by chance.”[5]
If only we could wear our architecture!…
Though we are deep in what might feel like stream-of-consciousness type writing, I sincerely think we can learn a lot about architecture by considering these purse constructions, but also about the implications of real things - things that have been crafted, fabricated, or constructed. Though we design spaces, I personally found that we don’t get to thinking enough about how these spaces literally come together while in school. Sure, maybe you’re asked to create a detail-like drawing or assigned to recreate the corner of some case study house, but there’s not much joy in either of these - at least not in my experience. I like the purse because it’s small but not abstract enough to be made out of one homogenous material - like our models. A wearable accessory like the purse is not restricted to the world of fashion - we can reconsider it in our own terms as architects. And unlike, say, a chair, if it is designed a certain way, we can make it ourselves without needing to jump into a whole new realm of craft. Plus, if you were to make your own purse, you’d be able to wear it too!
All of this talk about acrylic, beads, purses, vessels, and collaborative back and forth, really got me excited and I kind of wanted to see if I could make one of my own designs (Fig. 105) through an acrylic fabricator. I drew up what I thought was a simple though interesting design, one that combined Culta Gaia’s vessel-ness and Susan Alexandra’s beading logic : I wanted to create enormous beads that could be threaded together into one object, and I sent the drawings (Fig. 106) to one of the most well known acrylic fabricators : @plexicraft in New York. I saw a photo on their feed (Fig. 107) that made me want to create something with bent round stock (Fig. 108).
@plexicraft very quickly turned me down and redirected me to Canal Plastics who said they do not bend round stock - though they do have an amazing array of plexi. Eventually, I did end up finding a fabricator in California : Bell Plastics Fabrication would not bend (considering the small size) but they would cast my design in acrylic. However, their price tag for the work was nearing $2,000. While I was excited about the prospect of working with a fabricator (I’m just genuinely curious about the workflow since it seems most of architecture needs to function this way), I decided I could do it myself for much (MUCH) less. I also had not considered casting resin. I originally wanted to bend round stock, so even if reaching out to fabricators was not successful, it did give me that lightbulb moment.
Currently finding myself in El Paso, Texas, I do not have access to a CNC, so I quickly Googled CNC shops and came across @compound_design who charges $125/hr of machine time. They very generously donated left over MDF to mill my mold (only about 10” x 10”) (Fig. 109), which ended up being a one hour job. I ordered shellac, beeswax, some brushes, and sandpaper from Lowes to curbside pick-up (around $40.00) . At home, I prepared the mold by sanding and shellac-ing three times and brushed a thin layer of baby powder ($2.00) before pouring rubber (Fig 110) (I used about kit of Oomoo 25, which is $30.00). Once the rubber dried, I pulled it off (Fig. 111) and got to pouring acrylic. Each rubber mold took about 8oz of resin, and a 16oz package of resin is about $22.00.
In case it’s not evident, the 1/2” spheres on the mold make sure the two molds are placed correctly on top of each other and also doesn’t allow them to move once placed. I’m still trying to figure out how to get rid of air bubbles that get trapped in the mold, but the pieces still look pretty exciting and I’ve heard you can easily recast resin into the air bubbles (Fig 112 - 113). As I found myself criticizing these somewhat unsightly air gaps, though, I was reminded of a caption on @huicholamade’s Ig :
She’s complete! She’s not perfect, but thats ok because perfectionism is a tenet of white supremacy culture - and f*ck that.
Additionally, the 1/4” holes also do not quite meet - perks of a two sided mold are that things don’t match up!) Though they are close, they’ll require re-boring with a drill, which I currently don’t have. But once these holes are drilled, they’ll allow a 1/4” thread to connect and hold them in place - currently I’ve just been stacking them in place (Fig. 114). By the way, the 1/2” spheres (package of 100 is $12.00) and threaded rod (package of 4 is $10.00) that will connect the pieces are both from McMaster-Carr.
I’m currently trying to mill an over-exaggerated handle (9” long) (Fig. 108) and 1” spheres to cover to top of the connecting threads (Fig. 108) before heading back to Cambridge at the end of the month. I’m expecting to be in quarantine for a week or so before being able to be on campus, so I wanted to have these molds to play around with. I’m excited to make adjustments and try to cast these guys in different colors!
In total, this project has (currently) cost me :
$000.00 Donated MDF (I imagine a half sheet would have been at least $60.00?)
$125.00 1 hours of milling
$040.00 Shellac, beeswax, sandpaper, brushes.
$002.00 Baby powder
$030.00 Oomoo 25 kit for one two sided mold
$110.00 5 packages of resin (22.00 x 5) (in the future would buy in larger quantities to save money)
$012.00 100 1/2” spheres (can continue to use for many pours)
$010.00 4 threaded rods (only need 2)
$330.00
I still need to mill, cast more molds, and use more resin to have one “completed” purse. Ideally, these molds could be made easily as needed - you probably wouldn’t need to re-mill anytime soon. And you could use one two-sided rubber mold to cast several resin pieces. So if you were to sell these, you probably would mostly use the cost of resin and hardware (threads in this case) to begin to price them. I am imagining needing at least two more kits of resin to complete one purse, so the total resin would be around $150.00. Not entirely sure to be honest, but you can begin to conceptually understand and simultaneously question the prices of Cult Gaia and Susan Alexandra.
TLDR : It’s interesting to begin to question how (all) things are made, and as architecture students, I think we have the ability to do that with most things, even just conceptually because we are so well-versed in fabrication methods. It is important to question the process of how something came into existence because doing so reveals so many things we are typically unaware of. Additionally, making comes with a price - whether its the price of fabrication, material, or labor. We typically make our own models of our own designs in school, but once out of school, we’ll be making much bigger things, which also mean these questions will all have larger implications. So who are the people making the things we design? Why have they been chosen to make them? And what does price reveal about our processes?
Follow @wip.ish on IG for accompanying images (Fig. 73 - 114) and an eclectic source of unrelated WIPs. On that note, I also want to know what, where, and how you make! DM or email me at wip.ishhh@gmail.com with unsolicited WIP images or #wip posts with an optional caption and IG handle to be featured on the WIP-ish IG :
This week’s featured WIP is @bysecondwind via @aoc via @dietprada : Second Wind is a small women-owned business founded by Karen Perez that was recently featured by @dietprada because their recent and original face linen mask with adorning safety chain design was directly lifted by influencer Danielle Bernstein from @shopweworewhat. Recently, @bysecondwind was visited by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, @aoc (Fig. 114) who featured the company on her Ig stories (Fig. 115-117), writing :
It is so important for people to see the labor that goes into their clothing and accessories. From small family businesses to even fast fashion, a lot of people believe that clothing is produced entirely by machines or robots. It’s NOT! A lot of your clothes, including clothing from big stores, are touched by human hands. This is what a made-in-NYC startup operation looks like (Fig. 115).
When people hear the word “factory,” the image that usually comes to mind is huge machines, conveyor belts, and environments that are largely automated. But this is a factory, too - and what a lot of small factories look like as well. That’s why it’s important for us to see & HONOR the workers that make your clothing, food, etc. They are produced by human hands (Fig. 117).
I wish we were more conscious of who makes the things we design because @aoc is right - it’s always human hands that are in some way or form making anything and everything. It’s an aspect of architecture we don’t talk enough about, but it’s a topic that is loaded with questions of politics. My own personal research at MIT is interested in an architecture that we can fully author (design and make) ourselves, where we consider representation as constructed and thus fully make the things we design.
[1] Liao, Marina, “What I Wear to Work : Jasmin Larian Hekmat, Founder and Creative Director of Cult Gaia. Marie Claire Website. 08.03.20
[2]Montero, Roytel, “Meet the Designer Empowering Migrant Women and Creating Handcrafted Treasures”. Forbes Website. 08.03.20
[3] Li, Michelle, “Those Beaded Bags You Love? Susan Alexandra Wants You To Thank These Women”. Refinery 29 Website. 08.19.20.
[4] Williams, Katherine, “In Conversation with Susan Korn, Instagram’s Whimsical Fashion Queen”. Lithium Magazine Website. 08.20.20.
[5] Lehava, Noah, “The Fashion Set Can’t Get Enough of Susan Alexandra’s Colorful, Kitschy Designs”. Coveteur Website. 08.20.20.