When I began choosing the hardware for the Ruyi, I did not think of metal as a finishing decision that could be made after the rest of the handbag was already complete.
By that point, the bag had developed a visual language of its own. The curve of the flap came from the historical ruyi. The carved clouds grew from the wider visual language surrounding that object. The first colours had been chosen through their relationships with material history rather than simply because they coordinated with one another.
The hardware needed to belong to that same world.
I considered the most obvious directions first. Bright silver would have made the Ruyi feel cooler and sharper, while highly polished yellow gold would have introduced a brighter and more jewellery like quality. Either could have been beautiful on another bag, but neither felt completely at home beside the carved leather, the concentrated colours, and the historical references that were already shaping the design.
I kept returning to something warmer and quieter.
That search eventually led me toward bronze.
Bronze played an extraordinary role in early Chinese material culture. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the Shang and Zhou dynasties as the Bronze Age of China and explains that bronze, an alloy principally of copper and tin, was used for ritual vessels, weapons, and chariot components. Ritual vessels became particularly important because ceremonial practice was deeply connected to the social and political structures of the period (Department of Asian Art, 2004).
These objects were not significant simply because bronze was more expensive than clay.
Material changed the meaning of form.
A British Museum late Shang dynasty ding demonstrates this particularly well. The museum notes that bronze versions of vessel forms related to everyday cooking were used within ritual contexts rather than ordinary meals. The material was scarcer and more labour intensive than ceramic, while casting allowed craftspeople to create highly controlled forms and intricate surface decoration (British Museum, n.d.-a).
I became interested in the idea that a familiar form could change in meaning when translated into another material, context, and function.
That felt unexpectedly close to what I was trying to do with XU.
The Ruyi handbag does not reproduce the historical object from which it began. It takes the form seriously enough to study it, changes the function completely, and then asks what parts of the original design language can survive the transformation.
I wanted the hardware to follow the same principle.
The metal used on the Ruyi is not ancient Chinese bronze, and I do not describe it as though it were. The hardware uses a warm brass toned finish chosen partly in response to the visual and material world of Chinese bronze objects.
The distinction matters because I am not interested in manufacturing the appearance of antiquity.
I did not want hardware that looked artificially excavated, corroded, or aged in an attempt to make a new handbag appear ancient. I wanted the reference to remain much more restrained.
What interested me was warmth.
Ancient Chinese bronzes are particularly useful here because the way we encounter them today is not necessarily the way they originally appeared.
Centuries of burial, oxidation, environmental exposure, and conservation have produced the dark brown, black, and green surfaces that many people now associate with archaeological bronze. The British Museum notes that Shang bronze vessels could originally have appeared much more golden when newly cast and polished before their surfaces changed over time (British Museum, n.d.-b).
That history gave me permission to separate bronze from the idea that any contemporary reference to it needed to reproduce an aged museum surface.
I did not want artificial green patina or simulated corrosion.
I wanted the sense of warmth that metal could bring to the handbag without becoming brilliant or overly decorative.
Against Cinnabar, the hardware needed to feel rich without competing with the red. Against Jade, it needed to introduce warmth beside the cooler green. Against Earth, I wanted the metal to sit naturally against the depth of the brown leather rather than appearing sharply placed on top of it.
The finish therefore had to do two things at once.
It had to work across all three colours as a contemporary hardware choice while also feeling connected to the larger material world XU was beginning to build.
The relationship between form and surface in early Chinese bronze also interested me.
Shang and Zhou ritual vessels often combined relatively controlled silhouettes with extraordinarily intricate ornament. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes the sophistication of early Chinese bronze casting and the elaborate surface decoration made possible through piece mold techniques (Department of Asian Art, 2004).
That relationship between contained form and detailed surface reminded me of something I had already been doing with the Ruyi.
The handbag itself is structurally composed, while the carved clouds introduce movement across its surface. The two are intended to work together rather than compete.
I did not design the Ruyi as a bronze vessel translated into leather, and I would not want to imply that the resemblance is more literal than it is. Studying Chinese bronze simply helped me understand why a warmer metal presence felt more coherent beside the carved leather than bright silver or polished yellow gold did.
The historical connection became even more relevant when I began looking at what happened to bronze design after the periods we usually associate most closely with ancient ritual vessels.
Chinese bronze culture did not end when the Shang and Zhou political worlds changed.
Centuries later, artists, collectors, scholars, and patrons returned to ancient bronzes as objects worthy of study and reinterpretation.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art's research on Chinese bronzes from approximately 1100 to 1900 describes a major revival beginning around the twelfth century. Ancient bronze vessels were collected and studied, while craftspeople created new objects that drew from archaic shapes and decorative vocabularies. Forms once associated with ritual vessels were adapted into incense burners, flower vases, objects for the scholar's studio, and other forms suited to very different lives (Lu, 2025).
That history resonates with me much more deeply than the idea of simply making something look ancient.
Later makers did not always treat the past as a fixed catalogue that had to be reproduced unchanged. The Met describes many of these later works as creative reinterpretations with their own functions and aesthetic identities (Lu, 2025).
An old design language could be studied, understood, and allowed to become something else.
That is much closer to the question at the centre of XU.
I keep returning to the idea that history does not have to survive only through reproduction. A form can change, a material can change, and a function can change while a relationship with the source remains visible.
The warm hardware became one small expression of that philosophy.
It would have been easy to treat metal as a conventional luxury signal and choose whatever finish seemed most familiar or expensive. Polished gold has a long relationship with luxury handbags, while silver can immediately make an object feel cleaner, cooler, or more modern.
What interested me was whether the hardware could participate in the same thinking that shaped the rest of the Ruyi.
That does not mean every visible detail on XU needs an elaborate historical explanation. A hardware finish still needs to work aesthetically, function properly, age well, and sit naturally with the leather. Research should never become an excuse for making a decision that does not actually improve the object.
The history gives me a place to begin.
The finished choice still has to work in the present.
For the Ruyi, the warm finish survived both questions.
It made sense beside the colours and carved surface, and it also connected naturally to a material history that felt relevant to XU.
Someone carrying the handbag does not need to know any of this.
I do not expect a person to look at the turn lock and immediately think about Shang ritual bronzes, archaeological patina, or later revivals of archaic metalwork. If the hardware required that knowledge before it looked right, then the design would not be doing its job.
The bag needs to work before the explanation arrives.
The history exists underneath it.
If someone eventually becomes curious about why the hardware is warm rather than bright gold or silver, there is simply somewhere for that curiosity to go.
The answer begins with aesthetics because the finish needed to sit naturally beside Cinnabar, Jade, Earth, and the carved leather.
It continues into material history because bronze offered a visual world that felt more relevant to XU than a generic luxury metal finish.
Most importantly, it leads back to the same design philosophy that shaped the rest of the handbag.
History should not appear only in the most obvious places.
If the Ruyi is genuinely being influenced by the past, then that influence should extend beyond the silhouette and the carving. It can affect colour, surface, proportion, material relationships, and details small enough that someone may never consciously ask why they look the way they do.
The hardware does not need to imitate an ancient bronze object in order to carry something forward from that material language.
It only needs to belong convincingly to the contemporary object it has become.
For me, that is enough.