O

Coming from a fine art training and having both worked with painting, photography, installation and curating contemporary art, we shared ideas about how we could differently develop our creative drive in a new and different direction. Therefore we decided to create forms with the potential to make them into functional objects by discovering and reinventing fabrics and various other materials. We started experimenting with making handbags and jewelry, slowly learning how to make our own patterns and how to work metals. We integrated these two aspects into one practice that is today even richer, where a necklace becomes a handle for a bag, a dress becomes a bag or a necklace becomes a belt. This propensity for multi-functionalism keeps a challenging balance with the minimalism of our design.
All O bags are hand-made, in limited editions, with a propensity to hand-sewn details. We have a studio in Rome, where all our ideas germinate and come to life in an experimental way. We also have a base in our home country Romania.
We think of our bags as objects, with a distinctive presence and a rigorous stature in space and time. We approach bag-making with a vision that is free of traditional rules. We start the process of creation by emptying our minds of all existent information of standard shapes, accessories, dimensions, materials. We take inspiration from states of mind or from elements in nature. We like to imagine our bags as growing out of the body. For most of the times, the O bags and jewelry take innovative shapes, following unique combinations of fabrics and forms. This multi-disciplinary operating mode stems from our art backgrounds that require everything to be invented or constructed from scratch.
We juxtapose materials that give a peculiar feel altogether when caressed with eyes shut. Texture is primordial. Hairy velvet, felt, carefully picked leather and suede, silk threads, sand-washed silk, flesh-like silicone. Our 2012 winter collection will be entirely constructed by using only two materials, felt and leather, and a restricted palette. We like to push creativity to the maximum through this reduction strategy, where the result is a collection of innovative shapes that re-contextualize and reinterpret leather and felt.
Our design is characterized by a play with antagonisms: invisible seams vs. very pronounced hand stitching, super smooth vs. enormously rough textures, strong concealed closures vs. no closures at all, delicate feminine shapes vs. incisive masculine cuts. This play of opposites is rooted in the coexistence of two cultural frames of mind: the Eastern inspiration of our Romanian origins, and the Italian style of our current context. The people wearing O bags are usually individuals interested in new materials and form, curious of research, innovation and avant-garde, lovers of minimalism, of androgyny or, on the contrary of the delicacy of feminine design. We want our friends wearing O bags to caress them, to be mesmerized by the juxtaposition of textures and by the feeling of freedom and simplicity our objects give them.