This bag is an archive.

Made from a print I created using vintage beauty & barber shop ads layered with hair magazine imagery, those pages passed hand to hand in salons, barbershops, and living rooms. Hair magazines weren’t just style guides; they were mirrors, aspirations, gossip, performance, expression, and self-fashioning. 

I reflect on growing up in a hair shop, waiting for my barber dad to finish his last client flipping through magazines, studying styles as art, and mentally combining elements from one look to the next for my stylist to create. Those bustling hours of community and creation in the shop shaped how I understand beauty, adornment, and possibility.

This work also holds a conversation across generations: my esthetician/ beautician grandmother’s 1960s perspective on beauty, its limitations, biases, and coded respectability alongside the progressions, ruptures, and reclamations that followed.

This piece pulls from that world, Black hair culture, bling culture, and the visual language of adornment and pride. Loud, glossy, intimate. Sublimation printed with eco-friendly, water-based inks. Handmade in Detroit.