Rising Star: Handbag Designer, Sara Lloyd

Like most New York women, Sara Lloyd is obsessed with handbags. “A purse is your statement piece,” explains the Southern native. “And it always fits!” For Lloyd, a former intern at Kate Spade, her obsession burgeoned into a business, Sara Lloyd Ltd. Her custom-made handbags are one-of-a-kind objets d’art, distinguished by high-end European fabric and vintage costume brooches. Her aunt, an owner of Travis & Company, a mid-century and modern fabric house for interior designers, supplies Lloyd with a plethora of limited edition or discontinued fabrics. “Each fabric she gives me is enough to make one or two purses,” says Lloyd, showing me reams of hand screen-printed Spanish fabric, intricately embroidered French textiles, and subtle British imports.

©Zach Hyman 2010

 For the centerpiece, Lloyd digs for treasure at her favorite flea markets – Scotts Antique Market in Atlanta, the Chelsea Flea Market, and Tender Buttons, a tucked-away New York spot that’s a century old and carries “exotic pieces from overseas as well as mass-produced buttons.” She is by nature a collector, as are most die-hard flea market junkies-cum-fashionistas, and has a shoe box full of treasures for her clients to choose from. “My signature is a flower brooch,” explains the designer. “I like big, colorful pieces – something that pops.”

Lloyd, who officially launches her business with a party/art show on December 2, 2010 at the L.E.S. pop-up gallery, Panda, has found herself a niche clientele in the wedding industry. Her clutches have caught on as bridesmaid gifts. “The bride will come in and choose what fabric she wants for each bridesmaid’s purse.”  Nothing says thank you like couture, and priced to sell (within the $80 range) these handcrafted goodies are less expensive than something you will find on the rack.

©Zach Hyman 2010

Lloyd’s clutches are delicate, made to carry a gal’s essentials: “License, cash, one credit card, cell phone, and lip gloss.” After all, wearable art is about making a statement, not cramming your entire life into a bag. 

©Zach Hyman 2010

To RSVP to Sara Lloyd Ltd.’s Launch Party featuring photography by “It” boy photographer, Zack Hyman, and the official unveiling of LoRayDesign, check out: Launch Party RSVP 

Thursday, December 2, 2010 from 8-10 PM

Panda Gallery: 139 Chrystie Street, NYC

The Undoing of Harper M.

Something had happened these last months at the Cape. Harper began to fill with something so palpable she knew it from somewhere but couldn’t place it, and then it hit her. Relief. Oh, she’d meet her maker all right, but not from poisonous gas on the subway or in the sod of a rotted municipal machine. There’d been a mourning of sorts, a letting go. Goodbye to the device that filters water with nanotechnology; goodbye to softly-worn leaflets, those reading like prayers for sad women. Goodbye to the street urchins who’d hand her leaflets. Goodbye to escape routes; goodbye to code yellow, orange, red: DANGER!  Something inside her growing rampant, feral and out of control, this would be her undoing. This bug the best doctors in the best city couldn’t get a hold of, that her body kept alive and nurtured, that fed off her cells and blood and cytoplasm, it made her feel sorry for them, for Frank and the others. How they’d laugh if they heard her say it. She couldn’t say it – no – this was something you couldn’t say, not in the arms of your most cherished beloved, not after cataclysmic sex with a black Jesus. But as Frank steeped her tea in a pewter pot, dusted for mites beneath the bed, dragged down board games from the attic in their rented seashore abode, she could think it.