MOYA London's CARE Bag wins global award
Sustainable luxury handbag from Moya London wins coveted design award.
There’s more to handbags that meets the eye. To Margaret Thatcher, they were a weapon, an essential part of her power-dressing and according to her, the only “leak proof” place in Downing Street. To the late Queen Elizabeth II, reportedly, if HM wanted a conversation to end, she’d swap her handbag from one arm to the other and an aide would come shuffling over. A handbag on the table was a signal that a dinner should end in five minutes.). To the wealthy 1% - or at least Tom Wambsgans in Succession - a “ludicrously capacious” bag is a fashion faux pas, somewhere where proles keep “flat shoes for the subway” and a “lunch pail”. And to Sigmund Freud… well, his musings on what the handbag represents are probably best left for another website.
Fortunately, the new CARE bag from new London luxury handbag brand Moya London has more positive connotations: sending strong signals about sustainability and celebrating women of colour. It’s also part of the reason why designer (and Moya London founder) Moyang Yang beat hundreds of global competitors to win the Design-A-Bag award at the APLF Awards in Dubai [the world’s biggest trade fair for leather goods supplies] last month.
Yang’s crochet tote CARE bag is made with zero plastic and water-saving materials, with all yarns and leathers sourced from reputable, certified suppliers. Yang also describes her award-winning handbag as “an ode to Black and Asian women who are driving fashion sustainability…”
Yang might have won a prestigious fashion award, but she’s a relative newcomer to designing. Her career is varied: the psychology graduate previously worked as a research psychologist at management consultants The SHL Group, has founded a social networking app and worked as a customer researcher at Net-a-Porter. It wasn’t until maternity leave in 2021 that she taught herself handbag design. “I was breastfeeding my baby with one hand, while drawing bags with the others” she recently told Fab UK Magazine.
She resigned from her job at Net-a-Porter shortly afterwards to launch Moya London, which has subsequently garnered press in British Vogue and the Independent.
The brand’s luxury crochet handbags use materials such as certified organic cotton, and are produced in limited editions to avoid wastage. Moya London estimates some designs can take over 50 trials to get right.
It’s an ethos that is currently seeing leading fashion figures lining up to heap praise upon the CARE bags. As Olivier Vedrine, co-founder of Paris-based design agency [o,o] and lead judge at the APLF Awards, says, “The CARE Bag carries strong sustainability messages while telling beautiful stories of the women behind it.”