Credit: Eittem
If you are planning a trip to New York City, remember to look more carefully than you would usually reserve for the trees in Central Park or the gardens of houses: they might come back into your hands as handbags. It may sound visionary, and yet it is the project of the brand Eittem (pronounced item, to define a generic object, with no real specificity), luxury bags that are a hybrid of accessories and sculptures.
“We get our materials from a company on Long Island that collects fallen trees in parks and gardens and delivers the reclaimed wood to us, which we then turn into bags,” says founder Erin Saluti. Once the wood is cut to the correct shape (for now there are three models: Owl, Moon, and Bird), the bag is finished by hand using tools borrowed from professions very different from fashion and art: the wood is evened out using the pads used for car bodies while the inlays where the metal parts are inserted are engraved using dental scalpels. The interior is lined with high-quality leather that, in order for it to follow the natural curves of the wood, is shaped after being immersed in water using a special technique patented by the brand.
In short, a rather unusual approach for a luxury product, yet perhaps that is the value of the product, beyond the beauty of the bags that are already a bestseller with waiting lists, even given the fact that each bag takes two weeks to process. The price? Also exclusive: it starts at $5,000.
