There is something of a fine line between “art” and “art project,” and during the Burberry Fall 2014 runway show, the brand’s hand-painted handbags didn’t often stay on the right side of it. In a post-show interview with Vogue, brand head Christopher Bailey spoke of having studio staffers paint the bags, and the results generally looked like the product of hands whose primary job is not, in fact, painting things. A “back-to-basics” approach was clearly Bailey’s intent, but unfortunately it doesn’t make for bags that look particularly luxurious or expensive.
The collection also includes some bags with large swaths of Native American blanket-print textiles, which are light years more sophisticated than their painted counterparts, as well as some bags, all in the same elongated domed shape, which feature velvet embellishments. The vast majority of the bags were painted with oversized, amateurish flowers and leaves, though, and although normally I love painted bags, I wish Burberry, with its nearly infinite resources and influence, had tapped actual artists to do the painting like Prada often does; the results would have almost assuredly been no less earthy but light years more elegant.
[Images via Vogue.com]
