Where Our Bag Designs Begin: Art, Nature and Everyday Stories

Where Our Bag Designs Begin: Art, Nature and Everyday Stories

Art inspired bags are at the heart of many Polender designs, but our inspiration rarely starts with the intention of creating a new collection. At Polender, new designs usually begin in a much less organised way. An image stays in our head, a colour combination catches our attention, a pattern from an old book keeps coming back to us, or something that happened in everyday life suddenly starts to feel like an idea worth drawing.

We don’t follow a strict seasonal calendar. A new bag design appears when we have something we want to say or something we want to explore. Sometimes it begins with art. Sometimes with nature. And sometimes, unexpectedly, with a horse.

Art Has Always Been There

Art history is one of our most constant sources of inspiration. We are drawn to artists, movements and decorative traditions that treat colour and pattern as something more than decoration.

The Arts and Crafts movement is particularly close to the way we think about design. We love its attention to natural forms, botanical motifs and repeating patterns, as well as the idea that beauty should have a place in everyday objects.

There is something appealing about taking a visual language that once belonged to wallpaper, textiles, ceramics or books and imagining what it might look like on a bag that travels through a modern city.

We are not interested in simply reproducing historical patterns. Instead, we look at them, study the shapes and colours, and let them influence the way we create our own illustrations.

This is also why art-inspired bags are such a natural part of Polender. A painting or a decorative pattern can be the starting point, but the finished bag becomes something new.

Matisse, Colour and the Feeling of Summer

Henri Matisse has been one of those recurring references for us.

His work has a particular way of making colour feel almost physical. The later paintings, with their simplified shapes, cut-out forms and intense combinations of colour, have especially influenced the way we think about composition.

Our Matisse-inspired bags don’t try to reproduce his paintings. Instead, they take something from that atmosphere: the relationship between blue and other colours, the rhythm of organic shapes and the feeling of looking at something simple that still has a strong visual presence.

The Blue Matisse design grew from this fascination. Deep blues, simplified forms and a sense of calm came together in an illustration designed specifically for fabric.

Another Polender design, Dolce Far Niente, follows a different mood. Its name comes from the Italian expression for the pleasure of doing nothing, and the design grew around that feeling of slowing down, enjoying the moment and allowing yourself not to be productive for a while.

The two designs are different, but they come from the same place: using art and visual culture as a starting point for something that belongs in everyday life.

Nature Is Our Other Constant

If art gives us shapes, compositions and colour combinations, nature gives us an almost endless supply of forms.

We are particularly drawn to flora and botanical shapes. Leaves, flowers, stems, seeds and branches have a visual language of their own. They can be delicate or graphic, symmetrical or completely irregular, and they can be transformed into patterns without losing their connection to the natural world.

Sometimes we start with a particular plant. Sometimes it is simply the shape of a leaf or the way several branches overlap.

What interests us is not necessarily botanical accuracy. It is the way natural forms can be simplified and stylised until they become an illustration that works on fabric.

This connection between nature and pattern is also one of the reasons we keep returning to decorative art. A floral motif can be thousands of years old and still feel completely contemporary when placed in a new context.

Sometimes Inspiration Comes From a Story

Not every design begins with an artwork or a plant.

Wild Horses is a good example.

The image of three free horses under an orange star came from a real story about a horse named Aria. She had been used for illegal racing while still very young and injured her leg. Her future could have been very different, but she was rescued by a woman who decided to give her the time and care she needed to recover.

Today, Aria lives on a farm with other horses, goats, chickens and dogs. She no longer races. The difficult part of her life is behind her.

Her story stayed with us and became the starting point for an imaginary landscape. We pictured three horses with no fences, no races and nowhere they had to be. They could simply move at their own pace.

The orange star above them became a small symbol of protection.

The final illustration is not a portrait of Aria. It is an interpretation of what her story made us feel: freedom, safety and the possibility of a different life.

From Inspiration to Illustration

Whatever the starting point, our ideas usually begin very simply: with a small sketch in a sketchbook.

We draw, change things, simplify shapes and try different compositions. Some ideas never leave the sketchbook. Others slowly become illustrations that we can imagine printed on fabric.

At that point, the material becomes part of the creative process. We think about colour, scale, the structure of the bag and how the illustration will work with screen printing or, in some cases, hand painting.

This is where inspiration becomes design.

A painting cannot simply be placed onto a tote bag and called a new design. A botanical drawing has to become a composition. A personal story has to become an image. A feeling has to find its shapes and colours.

That transformation is one of our favourite parts of the work.

Designed to Be Lived With

We don’t make art objects that are meant to stay untouched.

We make everyday bags inspired by art, nature and the world around us. They are designed to be carried to work, through a museum, to the market, on a trip or simply around the city.

That is perhaps why we keep coming back to the idea of putting illustrations on something as ordinary as a bag. An everyday object can carry a little more than its practical purpose. It can carry a colour you love, a pattern that reminds you of something, or a story you didn’t know when you first saw it.

And perhaps inspiration works in the same way.

One image leads to another. A painting reminds you of a plant. A plant brings back a colour. A story about a horse becomes a landscape. A sketch becomes a print, and eventually, a bag.

We never really know where the next design will begin.

Maybe that’s the best part.