As I have worked on the Ruyi, one question has followed almost every decision I have made: can I explain why this belongs here?
I do not mean that every stitch, measurement, curve, or piece of hardware needs an elaborate philosophical explanation. Some decisions exist because the handbag needs to function properly. Others resolve a construction problem, create visual balance, improve the way the object feels in the hand, or simply make one proportion more beautiful than another. Visual judgment is still judgment, and I do not think a designer needs to invent a historical story every time instinct produces the better answer.
What matters to me is that the finished object should feel like the result of decisions that were actually made rather than a collection of features that accumulated because a handbag of a certain kind was expected to have them.
That distinction has gradually become one of the most important ideas behind XU.
The Ruyi did not begin as a handbag that needed a story attached to it. It began with an object whose history already existed.
Historical ruyi were produced in many materials and forms, but surviving examples preserve the distinctive curved head that became one of the object's most recognizable characteristics. The name 如意 carries the sentiment commonly translated as “as you wish,” and ruyi could be connected with auspicious wishes and gifting (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.).
When I began translating that object into a handbag, I did not want its history to survive only as something recognizable on the surface. I wanted the historical reference to participate in determining the form of the new object.
The curve of the ruyi became the starting point for the flap, which meant that the width of the body, the proportions of the handle, the closure, and the side profile eventually had to respond to it. Once the historical reference became structural rather than ornamental, it began affecting decisions throughout the handbag.
I explore that process in much greater detail in “From Sceptre to Handbag: How the Ruyi Became Form,” but the larger lesson has stayed with me beyond the flap itself.
A historical reference becomes most meaningful to me when it changes what I make.
If I can remove the entire reference without changing anything important about the object, then I have to question whether the history was ever truly part of the design or whether it simply became a story placed over something that had already been decided.
That question became particularly useful while I was developing the carving.
I went through many variations because something could be beautiful when viewed on its own and still feel completely wrong once it was placed on the handbag. Some compositions became too dense and competed with the silhouette. Others were attractive but seemed disconnected from the movement of the flap. There were designs that took hours or days to refine before I eventually removed them because the handbag became clearer once they were gone.
That process taught me something I had not expected to learn from designing a bag.
The amount of effort I have already invested in something does not automatically earn it the right to remain.
I can spend days developing a detail and still decide that the final object is stronger without it. Keeping something simply because I worked hard on it does not make the design more meaningful. It only makes my previous labour harder to let go of.
Over time, I began noticing the same pattern outside design.
People can hold onto relationships, expectations, habits, ambitions, identities, and definitions of success partly because of how much has already been invested in them. The history of something can begin to feel like proof that it needs to continue, even when we have stopped asking whether it still belongs in the life we are trying to build.
Designing the Ruyi has made me more comfortable with the possibility that removing something does not invalidate the work that came before it. Sometimes the work was necessary precisely because it taught you what should not remain.
That kind of editing has become as important to XU as adding meaning.
It is also why I do not want every XU handbag to inherit the same visible features simply because those details eventually become recognizable.
Many fashion houses develop recognition through a repeated clasp, quilting pattern, hardware shape, or silhouette. That kind of consistency can create an extraordinarily strong visual language, but it is not quite what I want to define XU.
The Ruyi curve belongs to the Ruyi because of the object that gave rise to it. Its carving belongs to the same historical conversation. If every future XU handbag repeated those details regardless of its source, the references would eventually become decoration rather than translation.
For XU, the more important continuity is the method.
Every object should begin with something worth understanding, whether that is a historical artifact, a material tradition, a construction idea, a philosophy, or another part of Chinese material culture. The source should then be studied carefully enough to understand what is essential about it before I decide what deserves to survive another transformation.
Sometimes that essence may become silhouette. Sometimes it may influence how an object opens, balances, protects, contains, folds, or sits against the body. In another design, the historical influence may appear primarily through material or construction rather than through an immediately recognizable motif.
The visual answer can change because the question has changed.
What should remain recognizable is the way XU thinks.
That is why I describe the design language less as a collection of repeated features and more as a process of translation.
History provides the source, but the contemporary object still has to become something of its own.
The same principle influenced the colours, hardware, and leather of the first Ruyi, although those decisions now have their own Journal entries and do not need to be retold completely here.
Cinnabar, Jade, and Earth developed through different relationships with material history, while their arrangement together as the first XU palette belongs to my interpretation in the present. The warm hardware grew partly from studying Chinese bronze and the long history of older forms being reinterpreted in later objects rather than reproduced unchanged (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2025). Full grain leather was chosen because retaining the original grain surface suited the material character I wanted for the Ruyi, not because one leather label can determine the quality of an entire handbag (Leather Working Group, 2024).
Each of those decisions asks essentially the same question in a different way.
Why does this belong here?
Taken individually, a flap curve, a carving composition, a shade of leather, a metal finish, or a material specification may seem relatively small. Together, those decisions determine whether the object feels coherent.
That coherence is what I mean when I say that everything on the Ruyi is intentional.
I do not mean that every detail contains a hidden cultural symbol waiting to be decoded. I do not want XU to become a puzzle in which every millimetre requires an explanation.
I mean that I want to understand why the decisions belong beside one another.
The answer might come from history, function, construction, proportion, material behaviour, or visual judgment. Sometimes the right answer is simply that one option makes the entire object more resolved than another.
Intentionality does not require symbolism everywhere.
It requires attention.
That principle becomes particularly important when I think about the parts of the handbag that most people will never see.
The exterior is public. It appears in photographs, campaigns, social media, and product pages. It is where the silhouette, carving, colour, and hardware become recognizable.
The interior belongs much more closely to the person carrying the bag.
Most people who encounter a Ruyi will never inspect its inside carefully, but the owner will interact with it constantly. That changes the way I think about hidden construction and details because it raises a different question about who the standard is actually for.
If care exists only where someone else can see it, then part of that standard is being maintained for an audience.
When the same attention continues into the parts of the object that primarily serve the owner, the relationship becomes more meaningful.
That does not mean every concealed surface needs unnecessary decoration or expensive details simply so that XU can claim they exist. Sometimes the most intentional decision is restraint, and sometimes a hidden component deserves attention precisely because it has a structural job rather than a decorative one.
This is also where design philosophy and construction standard need to remain distinct.
The Journal can explain why an object looks the way it does and how the research shaped its design. The XU Standard has a different purpose. It defines the expectations that should remain consistent even when the visible language of one handbag changes completely from another.
Those expectations include the way structural areas are reinforced, the way stitching is chosen for the demands of a particular construction, the way hardware is expected to operate smoothly and consistently, the way plating and finishing are specified, the way hidden components are treated, and the way a completed handbag is inspected before it reaches its owner.
The historical source may change from one XU object to another.
The expectation of care should not.
I find myself thinking about that distinction outside design as well.
A surprising amount of who we become is shaped by choices that receive very little recognition. The boundaries we maintain when nobody applauds them, the standards we keep when nobody is checking, and the promises we make privately to ourselves can sometimes reveal more about us than the choices we make when an audience is present.
That may be one reason hidden details interest me so much.
They reveal whether the standard belongs to the object or only to its presentation.
The process of developing the Ruyi also produced far more ideas than the final handbag could ever hold. There were different flap shapes, carving compositions, proportions, hardware finishes, structural solutions, and details that never reached production.
I used to think showing those rejected versions might make the process appear uncertain, as though a good designer should somehow know the final answer immediately.
I no longer think that.
The rejected versions are evidence that choices were actually made.
The final Ruyi is not the accumulation of everything I thought of. It is what remained after I decided which ideas deserved to exist together.
That distinction matters because adding more meaning does not necessarily create a more meaningful object.
A handbag can become crowded with symbolism in exactly the same way it can become crowded with ornament. If every surface needs a reference, every material requires a metaphor, and every minor choice demands a historical justification, then research begins to overwhelm design rather than strengthen it.
Meaning requires editing too.
I want enough history beneath XU that curiosity is rewarded, but I do not want someone to feel that they need to complete a reading list before they are allowed to appreciate a handbag.
The design has to work before the explanation arrives.
Someone should be able to encounter the Ruyi without knowing what 如意 means, without recognizing the source of the flap curve, without understanding why the metal is warm, and without knowing the histories behind Cinnabar, Jade, or Earth.
The object should still feel coherent.
If curiosity comes afterward, the Journal provides another layer.
This is where I think the distinction between storytelling and design becomes especially important.
A meaningful story can be written about almost anything after it has already been made. If I choose a colour simply because it photographs beautifully and then search afterward for a historical reference that makes the decision sound significant, the research may improve the marketing story, but it did not influence the object itself.
For XU, the sequence matters.
I want research to happen early enough that what I learn still has the ability to change the decision. The explanation can come later, but the influence has to arrive before the object is finished.
That does not mean research dictates the answer.
History is not a set of instructions telling me exactly what a contemporary XU handbag should look like. Design still requires interpretation, editing, experimentation, rejection, technical problem solving, and choices made entirely within the present.
What matters is that the conversation with the source happened before the story was written.
That may be the clearest description I have found for how I want XU to work.
I want curiosity to come before decoration. I want research to produce better questions rather than predetermined answers. I want to remain clear about the difference between what history documents and what I am interpreting as a designer. I want to be willing to remove ideas that no longer serve the object, even when I have invested significant time in developing them.
Most importantly, I want the final design to contain enough restraint that the ideas which remain can actually be understood.
The longer I work this way, the more intentionality has started to mean something different from perfection.
Perfection suggests that there was one correct answer waiting to be discovered and that the designer's job was simply to find it.
Intentionality allows for many possible answers, but asks me to understand why I ultimately chose this one.
I think life can become crowded in much the same way a design can. Expectations, obligations, habits, fears, identities, and definitions of success accumulate until they begin to feel inevitable, even when we never consciously decided that they belonged.
I do not believe everything in a handbag or in a life needs to carry profound meaning. I do think there is value in occasionally asking which things were chosen deliberately and which things remain simply because nobody ever questioned them.
That is what I mean when I say that everything on the Ruyi is intentional.
The history was not applied to a finished handbag as decoration. Research participated in the decisions that created it, while function, proportion, craftsmanship, material, and contemporary judgment determined what eventually remained.
That approach is also what I want to survive after the Ruyi.
The next XU handbag does not need to look like this one. It does not need the same curve, carving, proportions, or hardware because its source may ask entirely different questions.
What should remain is the standard of thought behind it.
For me, that is the difference between giving a product a meaningful story and allowing meaning to participate in what the product becomes.