'Bread Bags', Luxury Designer Purses Ironically Recreated With an Assortment of High-Carb Foods

Pancakes No. 5

“Bread Bags” is an amusing and ironic line of recreated high-end luxury brand purses by artist Chloe Wise. The bags feature an assortment of fake high-carb food such as bagels and lox, grilled cheese, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and pancakes with syrup that she made with urethane and oil paint before she added on the designer logo hardware.

Wise talked about her inspiration in an interview with Bullett Magazine.

I started this series of sculptures based off the title of those little LV bags: Louis Vuitton baguettes. The pun goes without explaining, with the first one I created taking the title literally. The bread is a mold cast in urethane (plastic) and then oil painted. Bread is a symbol of status and wealth (think “the breadwinner” or the use of the term “dough”) and these “it” bags connoted status in the early 2000s, which was the bat mitzvah era of my life (very important for a coming-of-age Jewess!). In those days, (and to a degree even still) these bags represented luxury, status, and afforded their owners instant popularity. I wanted to show the parallels between the idolatry for luxury items in fashion with the equivalent importance of the commodity in the art world. In a similar way, sculptures/artworks are valuable status items, and both designer goods and sculptural pieces can be seen as pieces of cultural capital. I have made and will continue to produce more sculptures in the same vein.

Bagels and Locks