Meet Stone Cloud. The latest bag from Published By, an accessories brand based in Vienna, it’s covered in reflective irregular shapes that seem to float across its surface—at once organic and futuristic—as though an Anish Kapoor sculpture has been sized down to a purse. Such a striking design leads to the question: How is it made?
Good thing its creator Christoph Tsetinis will giddily explain to anyone who asks. Since 2020, when he and partner Ruby Wallen started the brand, he has looked to the automotive and tech industries to develop bags that signal a conceptual approach to luxury.
For Stone Cloud, the 100 pebble-like components are 3D-printed using recycled and repurposed plastic and are then clicked into an interior frame. Italian craftsmanship on the leather inner pouch merges with German engineering for the chrome stones. Thanks to this modular configuration, each bag takes about four hours to assemble. Along with existing Published By bags, this it underscores how Tsetinis and Wallen are determined to reshape a category where classic still typically outperforms experimental.
“It’s always about really pushing the boundaries to the point that we can afford it or build it or produce it,” says Tsetinis. “It’s really challenging, but I think that’s exactly what we do in-house so well by just sitting there and not giving up. Other brands might have said, ‘Let’s just not do it.’’
At a presentation during Paris Fashion Week, the duo also showed off X-Ray, a sinuous hard-shell style coated in a heat-reactive material intended for the forensic measurement of car temperatures. When exposed to sunlight or touch, it temporarily brightens from black to white (not unlike the Hypercolor T-shirts that were a fleeting sensation in the early ’90s). As a nostalgic nod to Tsetinis’s memories of rave culture, Published By’s core chrome styles will come in a vivid shade of yellow and a gradient icy blue finish. They could be displayed in a living room the way an art collector might stage a Koons.
Hugo Preece, the senior buyer of bags at Browns in London has supported the brand since its early days. “It’s not often an industry outsider comes in and reinvents a genre, but that’s exactly what Ruby and Christoph were able to do with Published By,” he says, describing Stone Cloud as “the ultimate iteration of their vision—fully functional, simultaneously deconstructed, and flawlessly finished.”