When Fashion And Art Collide: How Handbag Label Onesixone Combines These Two Creative Cultures

Words by Gracie Stewart

2 min read

Onesixone is a luxury handbag label from Spain that showcases handbags as portable works of art. For each collection, the brand invites a new generation of Spanish and international emerging artists to collaborate on the bag’s print and design.

For their latest collection, Adrián Salvador, Onesixone’s creative director, turned to Brooklyn-based artist and fashion illustrator Kelly Beeman. Completely self-taught, Beeman has an unmistakable style and has previously worked with brands such as Elie Saab, Tory Burch, Loewe and J.W Anderson.

Beeman’s diverse body of work consists of simple, black and white contour drawings that evolve into fully rendered watercolour paintings portraying a vivid world composed of clothing, everyday objects, nature, and interior spaces. According to the artist, she is interested in the relationship between fashion and culture, and is inspired by fashion as an increasingly important feature of everyday life. By “dressing” the characters in her paintings, Beeman uses fashion as a tool to create personalities, narratives, and context, and explores the significance of trend and personal appearance in modern culture.

Kelly Beeman in her studio

“In my creation for Onesixone, I was inspired by the idea of human connectedness, closeness, and collision in a series of artworks in which fragments of faces, bodies, and nature form an abstract representation of unity – each entangled, touching, and overlapping, indistinguishable from the whole,” Beeman explained to MOJEH.com.

In addition to the brand’s iconic Gaia bag, which has been seen on the arm of Queen Rania on more the one occasion, Beeman’s collection for the brand includes a completely new style, the Gea, which is a leather clutch with a removable gold chain. As with all Onesixone collections, there are only 161 units of each style available worldwide making them a collector’s item.

Onesixone Gaia Large Face handbag by Kelly Beeman @onesixoneofficial

MOJEH.com uncovers the truth about the region’s innovative and thriving art scene.