From Isolation to Inspiration

Our happy collaboration with India Hicks first brought a selection of bags we created with her to the world just about a year ago in the early autumn of 2021. The story of this is told in an earlier blog, and its huge popularity was followed by the similarly sold-out, second collection, in denim and leather, in the spring of 2022.

The house India grew up in, and found herself isolating in during Covid, gave her inspiration for this third collection. The whole house was redesigned, and new gardens laid out, by India’s father when they moved there. The depth of detail in his designs is quite extraordinary and gives endless source of wonder in the house.

Print Perfect

A particular fabric from her father’s home dating back to around 1910 stayed with him from the start to the end of his life. He recreated a bedroom from his childhood home in the house he designed for India’s mother during their early marriage. It was in this bedroom that, between Covid lockdowns in 2021,  India spent many long hours isolating herself on her return from the Bahamas, to visit her mother. The Victorian flower print in tan and gold on a dusky black background made a deep impression on India, and she was keen to recreate it to use in this latest collection.

“It felt brilliantly British and entirely English; however, to make this new fabric our own, my son Felix added in motifs seen on the book bindings from the little libraries my father created around the bedroom. As children, we spent hours in this magical space, trying to find the row of fake books that opened into a tiny cupboard, somewhere to store your toothpaste and brush!”

These cherished memories bring fresh inspiration to India Hicks + Tusting.

The Family

This, the third collection, reprises two of the most favoured bags from the first collections, the massive, take-everything Sail tote and its smaller daily-perfect carry, the Soleil. In the new guise of a nearly-black canvas, a colour taken straight from the base of the Victorian fabric, trimmed with crisp, white leather, and gloriously filled with autumnal colours with the recreated fabric as their lining.

The little Sandwich pouch makes a return adorned with the delightful print, plus, a new creation, in celebration of pure, clean design lines, and Tusting’s own heritage, Savannah joins the family.

New this time and the ‘dream handbag’ for India, Savannah is a very generous, dressy and elegant all-leather tote. More than just a fashion hit however, Savannah brings heritage, sustainability and pure design to the fore.

Sustainably Beautiful

Effortlessly and sustainably beautiful, with super-model levels of look-at-me factor, the Savannah is the epitome of quiet, luxurious elegance. With absolutely no exterior branding to disturb the sleek exterior (loud branding is a particular bugbear for India), this is a bag that delivers in both function and form.

Created to be our most sustainable bag yet, the leather used is (like all our leathers) sourced from a tannery gold-certified by the global authority and watchdog the Leather Working Group. Their remit is to ensure planet-friendly production of leather, which is of course already an up-cycled material, saved from landfill. We then made this bag using no metal parts whatsoever, meaning that the whole piece can eventually be composted in the earth at the end of what will be a long and useful life.

Inspired by Simplicity

Inspiration for the Savannah came from another of David Hick’s houses, one he built on Windermere Island in the Bahamas, a neighbour to Harbour Island, where India now lives. Known as ‘the mausoleum’ the house called Savannah is daringly simple in design, starkly beautiful and stunningly memorable. Decades later, it is still as classically modern as the day it was conceived. It is a universal truth that such classic simplicity is always the product of extremely careful design, and so it is with our new Savannah.

Capturing History

Drawing once again on the skills of long-time friend, David Loftus to photograph this new collection, India invited us into the source of its inspiration, her childhood home. Still a peaceful haven for India’s 93-year-old mother, cousin to the Duke of Edinburgh and former lady-in-waiting to Queen Elizabeth II, the formidable and fabulous ‘Lady P’ graciously allowed us to range all over the property taking photographs, so completing another happy chapter in our collaboration with India.