Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
Emine Tüncer’s father was a fisherman, so she grew up around nets, line and the knots that hold them together. Today she runs Atelier Emine, an independent handbag label in Istanbul, and the knots have moved from the boat to the bag.
Emine Tüncer, founder and creative director of Atelier Emine, with a mother-of-pearl bag. Photograph: Mehmet Baki Çağlar. Courtesy of Atelier Emine.
The family’s trade is older than the label. According to Tüncer, it began in Bulgaria in the 1960s, when her great-grandmother, Emine Mutlu, started making leather handbags. The craft was passed down. In 1989 the family moved to Türkiye and carried on there. Atelier Emine counts all of it as its inheritance, 65 years by the brand’s reckoning.
The sea came into the work from childhood. Tüncer took the maritime knots she remembered from her father’s world, and the materials of fishing, above all high-strength monofilament, and asked what they would do in a handbag. Her first monofilament knot bag was where the design began. The brand’s own site gives the reason in blunt terms: the same leather, the same shapes, only the logos differ, and bag-making is losing its character. Its answer is a knotting technique that, the site says, machines cannot copy.
A knotted net of faceted bronze beads over a velvet pouch, with a beaded handle. Photograph: Mehmet Baki Çağlar. Courtesy of Atelier Emine.
The materials are not the usual ones. Pearls, mother-of-pearl, wood and faceted crystal are strung and knotted on monofilament, then set against velvet. The collections on the site carry names such as Crystal Gelato, Creamstone, Velvet Noir, Pearl Weave and Bois Noble. Look at the bronze bag above and you can see the idea at its plainest: beads run along a lattice of diamonds, and the fabric shows through the gaps like a catch seen through a net.
Monofilament is an odd choice for couture. It is the line anglers use because it is strong and nearly invisible, which means the beads seem to hang in space while the knots do all the carrying. That is why the pearl clutch below reads the way it does: pearls gather at the joints of a star lattice, long faceted crystals run between them, and a pale satin base sits underneath like water under ice.
A clutch of pearls and elongated crystals worked in a star lattice. Photograph: Mehmet Baki Çağlar. Courtesy of Atelier Emine.
Time is the other material. One bag takes about three to five days, depending on the design. The site goes further and says each piece is made from start to finish by a single artisan, in limited numbers. Asked which part is hardest, Tüncer does not point to the beadwork. It is the tension. A knot pulled too loose sags, one pulled too tight warps the whole form, and with a transparent line there is nothing to hide the mistake. Every detail, she says, is handcrafted.
The workshop pictures are the most useful ones in the set. In one, a needle and a gold-coloured thimble finish the top of a black drawstring bag, with shelves of beads blurred behind. In the other, an artisan in an apron printed with the label’s name threads wooden and rose-tinted crystal beads onto a gold-toned frame, a loop of clear line trailing across the table. It is slow, close work, done with the fingertips, and you can see why a single bag needs days.
Finishing a black beaded drawstring bag by hand. Photograph: Mehmet Baki Çağlar. Courtesy of Atelier Emine.Threading wooden and crystal beads on monofilament, in the workshop. Photograph: Mehmet Baki Çağlar. Courtesy of Atelier Emine.
The finished bags fall into two families. The knotted-net bags, in bronze or red with drawstring pouches inside, keep the fisherman’s logic on show. The solid beaded ones, teal, ruby or black, turn the same labour into a glittering surface and a handle that looks like a rope of crystal. Neither pretends to be anything but handmade.
There is a plain commercial logic here too. The label says it wants to keep its work out of the market of identical leather bags with different logos, and it does that by making each piece slowly and in small numbers, in a technique tied to one family’s history rather than to a trend. A buyer is paying for days of a person’s time, and the bags look like it.
A teal crystal bag with a woven beaded handle. Photograph: Mehmet Baki Çağlar. Courtesy of Atelier Emine.A black beaded top-handle bag with a silver clasp. Photograph: Mehmet Baki Çağlar. Courtesy of Atelier Emine.
It is a small, specific business, and that is part of its interest. A family craft that crossed into Türkiye in 1989 has ended up, generations on, as a fishing knot worked in crystal. Whatever one thinks of beaded bags as fashion, the line from a great-grandmother’s leather to a descendant’s monofilament is easy to follow, and nobody had to invent it for a press release.
A red satin bag netted in crystal beads, set among dahlias. Photograph: Mehmet Baki Çağlar. Courtesy of Atelier Emine.The ruby red beaded bag, with a gold chain. Photograph: Mehmet Baki Çağlar. Courtesy of Atelier Emine.
Atelier Emine is based in Istanbul. The collections are sold through selected channels and international online platforms, and the label ships worldwide; its website, atelieremine.com, lists free delivery anywhere in the world. Photographs in this profile are by Mehmet Baki Çağlar, used with the label’s permission.
