Brand Story & Fine Jewelry Hand Bags
Kimuse Revivals was born in a New York antique market, where Kim Sun – a Korean-born artist and an avid collector of Korean antiques and paintings – came across an old metal handbag frame hung on the side of a French antique chair. Though blackened with age, the pulchritude of the exquisite frame encrusted with gemstones was unmistakable. She brought it home and polished it. She fitted the frame with a hand-embroidered bag made of French velvet and Duchess of satin. Upon close inspection, alas, she learned that the crimson center stone had been replaced with a lab-created one. She searched for fine rubies and emeralds and set the frame anew. “I immediately got creative when I found the old and abandoned bag. By giving each bag a new life, I was able to carry it out of the boring museum.” Kim said. “Ladies who were fashionable at heart but felt shy to wear fine jewelry or haute couture fashion found my bag more accessible because the bag alone made quite a bold fashion statement.”
Collecting and reviving such abandoned frames or bags went beyond restoring the history and reconstructing their forms. To tell her stories about her lifelong passion for beauty and art, Kim began to show her original creations through spectacular exhibitions and trunk shows in Seoul, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
Decades before she created an exquisite collection of original fine jewelry-meets-couture fashion through the world’s one-and-only handbag series, she had been a painter and professor of ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement. When she is not working, she is happy being a true aficionado of fashion, royal cuisine, and botany. Naturally, the revived handbags reflect more than fashion created by the skillful hands of the metalsmiths of a bygone era. Within a five-inch frame is a unique form of art and expression of culture from the past and the present, which the artist Kim Sun always finds exhilarating. “Most of my antiques stay home, but these revived bags come with me wherever I go in style,” said Kim of the merit of her creations. And the nineteenth-century frame that turned into a chic Big Bag went perfectly well with current runway looks!
When Kim Sun became the muse of her own creations, it marked the beginning of her decades-long commitment to fuse history, heritage, and her personality through a distinctive genre of art that embraced the early idea of upcycling. Today, every unique piece of work proclaims the true definition of luxury based on a love of timeless art, fashion, and fine jewelry. Her finest touch shines on brilliant diamonds, color sapphires, rubies, and emeralds set on the platinum-finished frame above the most luxurious materials ranging from ostrich, seal, lizard, python to crocodile. Signed with a unique serial number by the creator, every work of Kimuse Revivals is truly exceptional.