I became fascinated by handbags because they hold so much of a person’s life while revealing almost none of it from the outside.
If you opened someone’s bag, you might find keys, medication, old receipts, lipstick, a charger, tissues, a notebook, a half finished packet of something, or an object that would make perfect sense to its owner and absolutely no sense to anyone else. Some bags are meticulously organized, while others contain the accumulated evidence of several weeks of rushing from one place to another. Yet when the bag is closed and resting on someone’s shoulder, most of that disappears from view.
There is something strangely intimate about that contradiction. A handbag is one of the most visible objects we carry, but almost everything it holds remains private.
I think people can be like that too.
We move through the world carrying histories that are largely invisible to everyone around us. There are expectations we have grown up with, memories we return to, responsibilities we rarely talk about, grief that arrives unexpectedly, ambitions we are still trying to understand, and experiences that may have shaped us far more deeply than another person could know simply by looking at us.
My own experiences with mental health made me think about this more carefully because what a person is experiencing internally is not always something they choose, or feel able, to make visible. Research on mental health disclosure has described mental illness as something that can often be concealed, which means people may have to decide whether, when, and to whom they want to disclose what they are experiencing. Those decisions can involve weighing the possibility of receiving understanding and support against the possibility of stigma or discrimination (Mayer et al., 2022).
The World Health Organization has similarly identified stigma as a significant barrier to mental health care and self care. Fear of discrimination, judgment, or social exclusion can discourage people from seeking support or speaking openly about what they are experiencing (World Health Organization, 2022a).
I do not think that means we should walk through life assuming that everyone around us is secretly struggling, nor do I want to turn mental illness into a metaphor simply because it makes a story about handbags sound deeper. Mental health deserves more seriousness than that. What stayed with me was something broader and much simpler: we know remarkably little about another person’s interior life from the way they appear on the outside.
Someone can look composed while having a difficult day. Someone can be accomplished and still feel uncertain about the life they have built. Someone can laugh with you, answer messages, go to work, make plans for next month, and still be carrying something they have never explained to you.
That realization made me more careful about the assumptions I make about people, but it also changed the way I began thinking about objects.
A handbag stays unusually close to us. It travels to work, dinners, airports, appointments, weddings, funerals, grocery stores, hospital waiting rooms, and all of the ordinary places that will never become significant enough to photograph. It sits under restaurant tables, on passenger seats, beside desks, on the floor by the door, and next to us when we come home at the end of the day.
Over time, it begins to carry the practical evidence of a life while keeping almost all of that life private.
The more I thought about that, the more I began to wonder why so many handbags say relatively little beyond the identity of the company that made them.
There are countless beautiful handbags in the world, and I understand why recognizable design codes and logos have become such a powerful part of fashion. Recognition can create a sense of history, belonging, taste, aspiration, and even continuity between generations. What interested me, however, was whether a handbag could communicate something in another way.
I began asking what would happen if meaning did not depend entirely on somebody else recognizing the object from across the room.
If the inside of a handbag carries pieces of our private lives, could the outside carry an idea of its own?
That question became one of the foundations of XU.
I did not want the object to explain the person carrying it, because people are far more complicated than anything they could wear. I was not interested in creating a handbag that announced someone’s identity, values, history, or personality on their behalf. What I wanted was for the object itself to have enough depth that its meaning would still exist even if nobody else recognized it.
There is a particular kind of value that depends on recognition. Someone sees an object and understands the logo, the reference, the price, the scarcity, or the cultural status attached to it. There is nothing inherently wrong with that form of value, but I became interested in another possibility.
Could an object contain history, symbolism, research, material knowledge, and personal meaning even when the stranger sitting across from you knows none of it?
Could the significance of carrying something exist before anyone else understood why it mattered?
This became especially important when I began looking at objects from Chinese history and material culture. I did not want to treat them as a collection of decorative motifs that could be applied to otherwise conventional handbags. I wanted to understand their forms, functions, proportions, materials, meanings, and the reasons they looked the way they did. From there, I could begin asking what those ideas might become if they were allowed to continue evolving into the present.
The first result of that process became the Ruyi handbag.
The historical 如意 already carried meaning long before I encountered it as a designer. Its name is commonly translated as “as you wish” or “according to one’s wishes,” and its distinctive form offered a visual language that could be translated rather than simply reproduced. The curve of the historical object helped shape the line of the handbag’s flap, while other details developed through the same process of studying, questioning, and translating.
The important part for me was that the history existed beneath the design rather than being applied to its surface afterward.
Someone may see the Ruyi handbag without knowing any of that. They may simply think the curve is beautiful, notice the carving, like the leather, or be drawn to the proportions. Another person may know the history behind it and see something entirely different. The object does not stop having meaning simply because not everyone in the room understands the reference.
I find something comforting about that.
We often talk about being seen as though visibility and understanding are the same thing, but they are not. A person can be highly visible and still feel misunderstood, just as something can remain private without becoming less real or less important.
Research on mental health disclosure reflects some of this complexity because disclosure is rarely a simple choice between complete secrecy and complete openness. People may share certain things in some settings while withholding them in others, and those decisions can change depending on relationships, work, family, health care, and the amount of stigma they expect to encounter (Mayer et al., 2022).
The more I thought about this, the more I began to value privacy not as something shameful or secretive, but as something a person should be allowed to possess.
Not everything meaningful needs to be made visible in order to become valid, and not everything someone carries needs to be explained to everyone around them. There is dignity in being able to decide what belongs to you, what you want to share, and what can remain yours without requiring an audience.
That idea is part of what made the handbag such a natural canvas for XU. It is simultaneously public and private. Everyone can see the object, but only the person carrying it knows everything that has been placed inside.
The material itself became part of this thinking as well.
I was drawn to full grain leather because it retains its natural grain surface rather than having that surface mechanically removed through corrective treatment (Leather Working Group, 2024). I liked the idea of beginning with a material that did not require every trace of natural variation to be erased before it could be considered beautiful.
I also liked the fact that leather does not remain visually unchanged forever.
Through use, it can soften where it is repeatedly handled, develop marks, and change subtly in colour and surface. Leather can also deteriorate when it is exposed to damaging conditions, so I do not want to romanticize every form of wear as though neglect automatically makes an object more beautiful. What matters to me is that leather responds to handling, environment, time, and use (Canadian Conservation Institute, 2018).
That relationship with time changed the way I thought about what I wanted a XU handbag to become after it left my hands.
I do not want to design objects whose beauty depends on preserving the illusion that nothing has ever happened to them. A handbag is made to participate in a life, and a life will inevitably leave some evidence behind.
It should travel through airports and sit beneath tables. It should be carried to work, brought to dinners, placed beside someone on difficult days, and taken somewhere important without requiring its owner to spend the entire time worrying about maintaining an untouched surface. Years later, it may become associated with a particular job, city, relationship, trip, period of uncertainty, or version of the person who once carried it every day.
I used to think about perfection differently. I often understood it as the absence of evidence, as though something valuable should remain protected from marks, wear, change, or anything that revealed that it had been touched by life.
I am becoming less interested in that definition of beauty.
There are experiences that change people, and I do not believe our worth depends on appearing as though those experiences never happened. That does not mean every painful experience becomes beautiful because we survived it, and I do not believe suffering needs to be turned into a lesson in order to become meaningful. Sometimes something difficult remains difficult.
What I do believe is that being changed does not automatically make a person, or an object, less worthy of being cared for.
That is a philosophy I want XU to carry into the objects it creates.
Two handbags can begin in the same leather and the same colour, yet years later they may no longer look exactly alike because they have moved through different lives. One may soften in a particular place because of the way its owner holds it. Another may develop small marks from commuting every morning. The surface slowly becomes specific to the person who lived with it.
I want that to feel like part of ownership rather than a failure of preservation.
The handbag cannot solve the things people carry internally, and I would never want XU to pretend that an object could provide an answer to something as complicated as mental health, grief, expectation, or identity. What an object can carry is a point of view.
For me, that point of view begins with the belief that the interior matters even when nobody else can see it, that an exterior can contain meaning without revealing everything within it, and that something does not have to remain untouched in order to remain worthy of being kept.
The longer I thought about handbags, the less interested I became in what they could tell strangers about the person carrying them. I became much more interested in what they could hold for the person themselves.
A XU handbag does not need to explain your life, reveal what you have been through, or announce what matters to you. It can simply be an object with an interior life of its own, carried alongside yours.
Perhaps that is what first made me love handbags in the first place. They remind me that carrying something and showing it are not the same thing, and that what remains unseen can still matter enormously.