Katie Gallagher
Exotic handbags spring to life from the creative mind and hands of Katie Gallagher.
Working her special touch with snakeskin, crocodile, deer, elk, moose and buffalo, she transfigures the leathers into highly functional pieces of wearable art that will endure for years to come.
Katie envisions her dazzling creations in the arms of other women just like her.
"I have created a distinctive line of super classic items, from evening bags to totally funky Soho, New York," she says. "There is something for everybody."
Her patrons remark that the bags make them feel "sexy" and "very confident."
"They know they have something no one else has. They know they've got a one-of-a-kind art piece. It's their Van Gogh in the purse world," Katie said.
This creative child of the seventies, voted most original in high school, wore flowers in her jeans and was always in love with fringe (think Jimi Hendrix). When Katie was a teenager, her older sister vacationed in England and returned looking totally mod, and Katie found herself "blown away by her sister's fashion transformation."
"I observed all that stuff, and it blew my mind. I was awed by it and just always had this insane love and eye for fashion," said Katie, who grew up with four siblings in Greensboro, N.C., where her father owned a dry cleaning store and mom was a reporter for The Greensboro Daily News and later a syndicated art columnist known as "The Witchery of Stitchery."
While Katie has been designing and crafting her singular leather creations for many years, she has been an inspired freelance hairstylist most of her life. "It's the bag making that truly sets my creative passions on fire," she says.
This crafty artisan plucks her material from an exotic hide market in Southern California. Once ensconced in her home studio, she gets down to the nitty gritty.
"Crocodile is horrendously hard to work with, real stubborn," she says. "It's a thicker hide for obvious reasons. The snake skins are really delicate and amazingly beautiful, rather abstract works of art by nature."
"Every bag that I make is unique -- I've never made two alike," Katie said. "When I look at a hide, I let it tell me what it wants to be."
While her inspirations occasionally take hours to click in her mind, she finds the most time consuming part of the process to be the stitching as she sews everything by hand, and it is double sewn at that, while each bag is lined in leather.
Katie's handbags take from five days to two weeks to complete. She can finish an exotic bag in five days, while a beaded fringe bag requires two weeks of her love and attention.
"What keeps them original is that I don't have desire to do mass marketing, and I have very limited time," said the art fanatic, world traveler and political junkie. Her game plan is to take custom orders only, so she produces an average of three bags a month.
Katie also produces accessories, such as eyeglass cases and makeup bags, as well as a line of men's bags that includes city bags and messenger bags.
"If I never sold a bag, I would still be making them. This is totally a part of my DNA," said the designer, who has about 100 handbags in her closet, many of them that she made herself.
A few of her patrons find her products almost too gorgeous for their own good.
"I had a client tell me she doesn't like to wear her bag because so many people stop her to talk about it and ask questions," said Katie, who has found her true calling.
"When I am in the midst of creating a bag, I wake up happy. I cannot wait to complete it. I just love everything about it," says hands-on artist Katie Gallagher.
Read more about Katie Gallagher on the Swank Lighting Blog