SPECIAL POST: Metal Artisan and Entrepreneur Sarah Cavender

Sarah Cavender Metalworks stunningly beautiful "Bee Bag." From the collection of The Vintage Purse Museum.

SPECIAL POST: Interview with Sarah Cavender, Metal Artist and Entrepreneur

The Vintage Purse Museum was fortunate to interview the enormously gifted artist Sarah Cavender, whose incredible metal designs encompass hair accessories, jewelry, belts, and handbags. Our focus for this article is her fabulous handbags, three of which we’re delighted to have in our collection. While some of her handbags are indeed vintage (20 years or older), those of more recent manufacture are still highly collectible works of art. 

This article includes her answers to our email questions, lightly edited with Ms. Cavender’s permission. We’ll start with her educational and artistic background, which she shared with us from her biography card.

2002 photo of artist Sarah Cavender, taken in Paris, where she received an award for her Bijorica Bag. Photo courtesy of Sarah Cavender.

Sarah Cavender Biography

Courtesy of Sarah Cavender 

“Sarah Cavender was born into an Air Force family at Travis Air Force Base on the first day of 1962. She spent the first five years in California and then the family was transferred to Tennessee, the Philippines, back to Alabama for a year before finally settling for over a decade in the Philadelphia area. Travel was a constant and definitely influenced the scope of Sarah Cavender's designs. She had an interest in Asian art after trips to Japan and Taiwan among other nearby countries, and was exposed to filigree crafts and weaving in the mountains of Baguio. The exposure to hand crafts had an impact on 10-year-old Sarah. 

Sarah Cavender formed Sarah Cavender Metalworks after graduating from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with a major in sculpture in 1984. She started with brass screening, developing a technique of treating and folding mesh to create beautiful flower and bug sculptures out of the unique material. The small start has expanded into a full line of jewelry, metal mesh belts and handbags. All of Sarah's designs are created in Sarah's small shop in Oxford, Alabama by Sarah and local craftspeople under her direct supervision. Each piece is plated or oxidized and then finished by a process of hand painting with bronze powders in a base of lacquer, and then sealed. The delightful colors are individually mixed and custom tinted.” 

Email Interview with Sarah Cavender

The Vintage Purse Museum: Thank you so much for this interview! Please tell us about yourself.

Sarah Cavender: I started my business in Philadelphia after teaching art in a City of Philadelphia summer parks program. After having decided I was probably better suited to work for myself, I took a trip to New York City and found a representative and sold some of my first items to Henri Bendel and other boutiques in NYC and Philadelphia. Then I attended a few NYC trade shows and I was off and running with an East Coast and West Coast representative. I married and moved to Miami for two years where the business started to grow. In a couple years, we had a young daughter and moved to Alabama to be near family. That was 1992, when I moved my business to Alabama, and in 1994, we purchased a building in downtown Oxford on Main Street and opened a retail space in the front with production in the back and upstairs. We continued to grow and contract and eventually I started focusing on handcrafted limited production pieces for galleries rather than the production jewelry geared for department stores. There were many reasons for this including the global competition, the gradual decline of many of our suppliers and the desire to be a craft studio rather than a production factory.

16 Feb 2014, Sun The Atlanta Constitution (Atlanta, Georgia) Newspapers.com 

VPM: You design and manufacture stunning wirework jewelry, hair accessories, and belts (our curator has a pair of Sarah Cavender Metalworks earrings, a bracelet, a choker, and a belt), but our focus for this article is your amazing handbags. When did you make your first bag? What made you decide to start making handbags? Was there a specific era, artwork, garment, or other form of inspiration?

 

SC: We started making bags in 1998 or 1999. We were making a lot of belts in addition to our jewelry in the late ‘90s. At that time, there was a huge mesh trend which included a shot of our belts in American Vogue and a jewelry layout shot by Karl Lagerfield in German Vogue. 

Vogue, Vol. 186, Issue 9, Sept. 1, 1996, screenshot via Proquest. Lower left, Sarah Cavender Metalworks metal mesh belt.

SC (cont'd): We had to adjust what we were doing because no one was interested in mesh after the huge trend. At that time we sold to Neiman Marcus, (and) many of the major department stores, and were flying high before we had to rethink everything. We started doing very special pieces including handbags after that. I always loved special purses, especially vintage ones, and enjoyed making various shapes with the materials we had on hand. The Snail Bag was my fourth handbag made in 1999. Honestly, I would say that the start of my bags came from the toys and crafts I played with as a child, Lego, electrical wire, and beads. I still consider design a form of play. But the materials do dictate the designs. The tubular wire knit mesh naturally wants to coil, and it was fun to make a "snail" bag with some tassels to add a little sexy oomph. The Bee Bag (2008) came as an accident when an employee couldn't get the shape right for the Snail Bag and suddenly we had a beehive on our hands. So, we put some bees on it and a handle and worked out the clasp and the Bee Bag is now one of the most loved bags we make. Our Industrial Long Bag (2009) is definitely inspired by a Barbie handbag. When you are working with difficult materials you have to keep the designs simple. We used grommets in our designs because I found boxes of them in my garage in Miami. The materials I have access to have frequently been incorporated into our designs. But this bag is made from an industrial wire knit which I sourced from a wire show. I did not know what I was going to make when I ordered rolls of wide industrial mesh, but soon we were making handbags and wraps with it. 

Sarah Cavender Metalworks "Industrial Long Bag" with original hang tag. From the collection of The Vintage Purse Museum.

Close up of grommets and tag on the bag above. From the collection of The Vintage Purse Museum.

VPM: What is the process for making a metal wire handbag? Does it start with a drawing? Is there then a prototype? Do you and/or your craftspeople work with a pattern or do they use the prototype as a guide? What type of metal is used in these bags? What tools are used to create a handbag? How long does it take to make each bag?

 

SC: The original bags are made from drawings, usually. We take photos and make photocopies of the originals and keep a sample on hand for details if necessary. There are patterns as well for some pieces. Our pieces are very handmade, the grommets are hand-set and the purses are soldered with lead-free solder and an air/acetylene torch. We have a jig for the snail bags to pin the bag in place as we solder them. After soldering, the items are cleaned, plated or oxidized, depending on the final color. The base material for the round wire knit bags is brass, the ones you have are silver plated. The long clutch bag is made of stainless steel and German silver with silver plated mesh details. It is lined with an additional layer of finer industrial mesh. Each bag can take several hours to complete, but we make them in stages. First the components are gathered and cut or formed, then they are soldered, sewn or grommeted. They are then cleaned, plated, and finally hand-painted with an airbrush. We paint the handbags with lacquer and assorted metal powders and seal them with another coating of lacquer. And we try to do several handbags at a time when we do make them. I would say we could make four or five handbags in one day with a couple people working on them.

Sarah Cavender Metalworks "Snail Bag" or "Tassel Bag." From the collection of The Vintage Purse Museum.

VPM: We have three of these beautiful pieces of wearable art in our collection, but the Bee Bag is arguably your most iconic. When was it first made? Do you know how many Bee Bags were sold? Do you know approximately when the other two were made? 

SC: The Bee Bag was made in 2008, first sold on Feb 2, 2009. The number is 13055, sold 135 pieces. It is quite difficult to make and requires precision to get it to line up and function properly. (The) Industrial Long Bag with grommets first sold Jan 28, 2009, (but was) also made in 2008. The number is 13053, sold 19 pieces. The Snail Bag or Tassel Bag was made around 1998. The number is 13004. It was the fourth bag I designed and made. I have sold over 475 pieces. My accounting system upgraded in 2005, so no record  before then on sales quantity, although I did find floppy discs with the dates and handbags. In 2002, I was photographed in Paris with the Bijorica, a handbag for which I won an award. (Photo courtesy of Sarah Cavender at top of this post.) We limited our bag production after Covid when I lost several key employees. We were so busy with limited resources that I could not produce them at the expense of our larger jewelry orders. And I had to remember how to make them myself! I just made a Bee Bag for the Frist Museum Shop in Nashville for an upcoming Lee Alexander McQueen show.

Closeup of metal wire bee on Bee Bag pictured at the top of the page. From the collection of The Vintage Purse Museum.

VPM: Did you do runway and trunk shows specifically for the handbags, or were they shown with your jewelry and other items? What stores sold these bags? 

SC: All of our items have always been shown together. We sold most bags at the small hotel fashion oriented shows rather than gift shows. We have sold bags to museum stores and "art to wear"-type  better boutiques as well as several craft and art galleries in the US, Canada, and Italy, and London. We have sold the Bee Bag to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Frist Museum in Nashville most recently. In the past we have also sold to Imagine Artwear in DC, Victorian Trading catalog for several years, and The Atlanta Botanical Gardens shop.

VPM: Did you discontinue making handbags? Would you ever consider making them again? 

SC: We have not officially discontinued them, they have been on pause. We make occasional bags if we have the time. I have a waiting list on the bags to do for when we are slow. They are truly a labor of love. We made the handbags to augment and add something special to our line. 

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A huge thank you to Sarah Cavender for sharing her story. Visit Sarah Cavender Metalworks online store at Shopsarahcavender.com. Other resources used for this article were Newspapers.com and Proquest. This article c2024 by Wendy Dager/The Vintage Purse Museum. Please do not use information or photos from our website without requesting permission, vintagepursemuseum@gmail.com.