In June 2018, a Hermès Himalaya Birkin with an 18-carat, white gold, diamond-encrusted lock sold for £162,500 at Christie's London, becoming the most expensive handbag ever in an European auction.
Things you need
fabric paint or acrylic paint
fabric medium
palette
brush
painter's tape
trash bag
alphabet stencil (comes in different sizes)
wet wipes
an old bag you're tired of using
Use a moist cloth to wipe down the bag
Tape the leather bits with painter's tape
Put on the alphabets, make it wonky for a graffiti edge
Mix 1:1 acrylic paint/fabric paint to fabric medium.
Tune into your frustration, the wheels of capitalism goes round and round, we're but slaves to money
Tune into your frustrations, go nuts on it!
Leave on even surface to dry, remove stencil when paint has settled in
Add more paint on the edges for a street bleeding "I can't breathe" look, spread it out to make it messy
Paint over areas with fabric medium
Add in brooches in random places for the heck of it. I wanted the brooches to stick out of the confines of the bag, to disrupt the original shape for maximum cathartic protest
The whole point of this is to keep people guessing, to keep people thinking, how the chase for image has gone up to crazy levels, keeping the poor inside the poverty cycle. It does nothing but make the top 1% richer as wages at the bottom are depressed. People argue about minimum wage, complain about paying taxes then complain about how people are unemployed lazy bums at the same time.
What happened to basic financial literary? What happened to basic human decency?
How can these people be even rich if it wasn't about privilege, refusing to help someone else and exploiting others as well? They don't even have common sense, which makes it all the more aggravating!
Yet, the poor are told to self sacrifice and spend all their time fighting for the greater good, instead of seeking financial security.
Like as if we can eat altruism, have you tried paying your bills with it?
Like as if the pain and sacrifices of marginalised people can even be quantified and reduced to something as basic as monetary value, like our collective humanity can be manufactured, bought and sold as commodities.
Oh wait, it is. Which is really the core problem with every kind of activism.
Imagine how many people that bag can feed, how people would rather preserve this in a safe, keep it under lock and key, then ever think someone would have basic survival needs.
Who cares? When you're rich and famous, people are quick to forgive, people can excuse everything and anything then. Your fans will blindly hero worship you, like as if they know you. You're respectable, finally legitimate, that is when you talk, that is only when you have clout.
When you have power over them, they listen, they listen not because you're more ethical, they listen because they want to be in a position of authority like you and want to learn from you.
It's not as if you're not demonised for being wealthy anyway, assumptions of corruption, cutting corners and lack of ethics kick in, people don't trust the rich as much as they don't trust the poor.
For different reasons.
The former is potential abuse of power and the latter is lawlessness.
Loads of people have trust issues, it's not even a matter of who and how, they're afraid of people, they don't know how to manage relationships.
So then why bother asking for activism from the marginalised? It is cruel and unjust, it is penalisation, exploitation and re-victimisation.
We all try our best and we all have to meet the maker one day, we're only equal when we die. In death or at the risk of death, people pay attention and even then for a little while, as long as you're useful for their politics.
It's finally taboo to speak ill of you, the ones intimidated by you can finally praise a dead martyr, using you to virtue signal away for their agenda, to make THEM look good, not genuine appreciation of you.
They would be happy to co-opt you as a feminist (even if you didn't bother proclaiming it), identify you as anything they see as positive, even if you didn't identify as anything.
They will paint you as more ethical even if it contradicts historical facts, because they want to protect your good name......for their politics. We're dealing with fake news, misinformation and biased data all the time.
The good news is you're free, no one cares. The bad news is you're trapped, no one cares. So might as well do you, you do what you want, people are gonna judge, hate, resent, try to break you anyway. If you're successful, they think it's preferential treatment, you didn't earn it. If you're not, they think it's your own fault.
People are so ignorant, they don't even know there's such a thing as bought followers, as much as they have a large following, it is assumed that their activism is successful.
At least in art, you derive a fleeting moment of freedom out of it, a taste of what it means to be truly liberated, hopefully it translates to how important freedom really is to you.
Check out DIY Denim Bleaching For A Tie Dye Effect
Another bag idea Upcycle Performance Art Wristlet You Can Actually Use
Eshet chayil, God is a She.
Min
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