Fat Man Bag

This is a synthetic leather bag in the shape of a scaled-down version of “Fat Man”, one of two nuclear bombs dropped on Japan during World War II.

I learned how to draft and conceptualize 3-Dimensional objects using textiles and thread over the summer of 2020. After 5 different iterations, and creating exact measurements in photoshop, I created the 6-Panel bomb body and 2-panel back.

This bag was made as a sociopolitical commentary. The way that American politicians, media, and education trivializes the civilian death toll and intergenerational damage caused by the nuking of Japan as “a necessary evil” is disgraceful, and I made this bag as a means of mocking this inhumanity. Handbags are a highly superficial consumer product, and making such a consequential and devastating object into such a shallow product is meant to mirror America’s trivialization of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.