What Women Carry: Accessories as Emotional Archives Across Generations

Category: Accessories

This project continues my ongoing exploration of the emotional and psychological experience of getting dressed, and the emotional aspect that our accessories carry. My previous research examined the relationship between body, dress and self-perception, investigating how the act of choosing what to wear becomes a negotiation between memory, identity, emotion and the different versions of ourselves that overlap in moments of dressing. Rather than treating fashion as purely functional, I approach it as a medium through which personal history, subconscious emotions and lived experience become visible. This investigation shifts that research from garments to accessories. The project began as a custom leather bag for an upcoming film exploring womanhood through familiar formats such as “What’s in my bag?”, focusing on elderly women and their personal belongings. As part of the process, I interviewed the women featured in the film, alongside the filmmaker and cast. Through these conversations, I realised that our emotional attachment to accessories is deeply shared across generations. Bags, shoes and personal objects accompany us throughout life, carrying not only our belongings but also memories, identity, subconscious associations and personal history. They become emotional witnesses to our lives, gradually accumulating meaning through time and use. The bag is intentionally oversized, measuring 150 cm in width, exaggerating the physical presence of an everyday object to reflect the emotional weight and invisible baggage our belongings carry with them over a lifetime. The leather surface features a graphic that I developed, edited and composed from layered analogue and digital photographs contributed by the women involved in the film, together with photographs I captured myself, spanning from the 1970s to the present day. The final composition was digitally UV printed directly onto the leather, transforming the material into a personal archive where multiple generations, memories and identities coexist. Rather than functioning as decoration, the printed imagery becomes embedded within the object, proposing the accessory as an emotional archive that records the passage of time and the lives it accompanies. The prototype was developed in collaboration with local leather craftsmen and manufacturers, supporting local production and allowing for close material and construction testing throughout the process. Early prototypes and print tests were produced using deadstock leather and leftover materials to minimize waste during development. The bag was designed using a near zero-waste pattern that maximizes material efficiency while preserving the intended form. Constructed from high-quality natural leather with replaceable metal hardware and a repairable construction, the bag is intended to age gracefully, extending its lifespan and encouraging long-term use rather than replacement. At the end of its life, its simple material palette allows the leather and metal components to be more easily separated for recycling or reuse. While this prototype was intentionally oversized to express the emotional weight and accumulated memories carried by our belongings, a future production version intended for everyday use would likely be resized while maintaining the same construction, material language, and concept.