The Loop Bag

“Nice bag,” strangers will tell you.

In fact, the Loop Bag starts conversations in public.

People like the originality of its sinuous shapes, the posh of its Nappa leather, and the surprise of its looped rope handles. And that’s just the outside. The insides hold your essentials hidden, yet close at hand.

Anatomy of the Loop Bag  

The bag is a circle of rope holding a leather sling. The rope is a “kernmantle” design, better known as a climbing rope. The sling, in soft Nappa leather, is a long flat tube doubled over into a loop. There are four covert places in that loop: 2 pockets, sling, purse/ring. 

Two pockets

A leather flap flips open to reveal two equal pockets. Together, they can hold too much: a phone, charger, earphones, sunglasses, pen, comb, lip balm, tissues, mirror, and passport. The less you take, the faster your access.    

Sling

The open loop lets you stash or shed things on the run, as weather permits (gloves, hat, scarf, poncho, mini-umbrella), or as chores demand. Bring a folded mesh bag to the farmers’ market; take home a fresh baguette or bouquet in the sling.

Card purse and key ring.

At the top of the loop, a small ring riveted to the leather, holds a sturdy elastic cord. The cord holds a small card purse/key ring that pull out easily, then, disappears back into hiding. The card purse holds credit cards, ID, and cash..    

Rope

A long, closed loop creates the bag’s structure. The synthetic kernmantle (climbing) rope, sewn into the bag, forms two loops: a long cross-body/shoulder loop and a short hand loop. The long loop can also be coiled into a short handle.

Why white? A sharper contrast. The next model uses a pattern of deep blue hues. Beyond that are the wild options of digitally customized, non-technical ropes using 100% recycled nylon and polyester.

What’s a Loop Bag?

It’s the handbag I couldn’t find.

So I designed it myself. 
On vacation in Napoli. 
There I met two expert artisans, Flora and Giuseppe, who made it real: The Loop Bag.  

What does the Loop Bag do?  

  • Fashion is not my style, but I like to wear intriguing things you’ve never seen before. I hope you’ll do the same. It’s sort of a conversation.

  • I wanted my bag to get my act together. To edit my inventory. To hand me my indispensables, not lose them in an abyss.

  • Going from metro to opera, I can flaunt or conceal the bag. Its slim profile goes anywhere without causing a fuss.

  • The bag is wearable in so many ways: Long (over the shoulder, or cross-body) or short (on my arm, in my hand).

  • A good companion on the road, soft and caressable as a service cat, the smooth Nappa leather holds its warmth. Durability makes it faithful and dependable.

  • The bag is a walking editorial about sustainable practices, entrepreneurship and work satisfaction. Let’s talk.

Artisanry

Flora and Giuseppe, makers of the Loop Bag, are young, second-generation leather artisans in Pozzuoli, an historic port town (photos below) near Napoli. In this region, small family workshops have kept the highest standards for leather craft. In Pompeii, a newly-restored tannery, ca. 79 CE, proves the 2000-year history of local leather-making. Today, luxury designer brands rely, quietly, on this concentration of expertise.

Artisanry, in Southern Italy, is a way of life barely understood in the U.S. Whether leather workers, tailors, or furniture makers, the artisans are not only master craftspersons, they’re entrepreneurs who work directly with clients or, on large projects, collaborate with local workshops. It’s a tradition of family businesses combining inherited knowledge with new techniques and (Italian) tools.

Sadly, Neapolitan workshops are disappearing as factories in China, Brazil, India, and Russia offer cheaper wares, using lower standards of tanning, treating, and sewing. The American brands, selling those wares, may portray the workers as artisans when they’re actually factory employees doing production-line work.

Southern Italian artisans want to make a sustainable living with pride, pleasure, and the security of continuity that keeps profits in their neighborhoods. Corporations call that “work satisfaction”—an elusive mix.

Sustainable

The excellence of Italian leather depends on the quality of both the hides and the tanning process. Near Napoli, known for its cured meat products, companies send hides directly to various local tanneries, all subject to strict national and EU standards. The supply chain is very short: food factory to tannery to artisans.

The name Loop Bag refers to the closed loop economy model that advocates re-use and re-cycling, to conserve resources that aren’t renewable. Since artisans are specialists in material behavior, not only do they know where their raw materials come from, they often live near the processing firms. They understand how material emerges (grown, smelted, formulated); how it can be altered (dyed, sliced, cast); how it changes over time (shrinks, hardens, dissolves), and how all materials beget waste products.

When artisans and designers work together, creating and problem-solving with an on-site “design-build” approach, both sides benefit. The artisans appreciate the designers’ challenge to innovate. And the designers find new opportunities for expression while learning the harsh realities of getting things made.

Unlike non-leather leathers, plant or plastic-based, fine leather is made to last as long as its owner. It’s a reminder that slow living, with slow owning, is actually progressive. If you buy the things that last and keep the things that work, you’ll soon be quoting: The more you know, the less you need.

The Loop Bag is a good, honest bag. It’s long-lived, durable and resistant to fads. What makes you love it, though, is its personality. Como si dice? Sensuous ingenuity.

Make something into something else. That’s what artisans and designers like to do. The great potential of everything to be otherwise.

Rope, an Inspiration

The Loop Bag reminds you to admire rope. Way before weaving, the rope became one of our oldest tools. Yet one of its biggest advances is a recent one, born well after nylon emerged in the 1930s as the first synthetic fiber. 

In 1953, Germans invented the Kernmantle rope: a core of twisted nylon fibers protected by a braided synthetic sheath. Known mostly as climbing ropes, they’re now indispensable to industry, arborculture, construction, rescue, and sailing.

Digital rope-making machines—huge and fast—can spin complex runs with patterns and color identifying the specs for the rope types. There are many. Trying to reuse material, some rope companies are now making sheaths from the residual “yarns” of their rope runs. The Loop Bag flaunts the Kernmantle rope while contrasting its high-tech synthetics to lower-tech leather.

Sometimes MoMA, the NYC museum, brings overlooked inventions to light. The Architecture and Design Department preserves the Vermelha Chair, manufactured by Edra, in its permanent collection. While visitors can’t sit in the red tangle of ropes, they’re touched by the chaos. Its designers, the Campana brothers made the 1992 prototype with a mass of rope, found on the street.  

MoMA’s art collection includes lots of artists obsessed by rope. In the 1960s alone, Christo offered to wrap the Museum with fabric and rope; Eva Hesse festooned rope from MoMA’s ceiling; Bruce Nauman combined wax with manila rope. (Home on his ranch, he roped wild horses.)

BARBARA FLANAGAN, the Designer

Trained as an architect, Flanagan uses design and sculpture to explore materials and ask questions about how we use them. As an author, and as a design writer for the NYT, she’s proposed reducing American life to a smaller, cherishable scale. She promotes the notion of satiety, or, “enough”.

In 2003, Flanagan started licensing products to MoMA Retail. She designed Tower of Clips, Face-to-Face Watch, Snap-It-Up Organizer, and two Hedgeware pieces. As a designer/vendor she contract-manufactured the Spiral File for MoMA. Many of her products re-purpose off-shelf components into widgets called “witty…clever…and surprisingly useful.”

As a bluewater sailor (with 8,000 sea miles), an open ocean swimmer, a food grower and a vegetarian, Flanagan thinks we could all be way healthier. Design reminds us to keep innovating towards that goal.

Sustainability starts with changing course.