Designers have, for so long, attempted to capture water. Imagine the sailors who have fallen prey to the currents’ magnetic draw. Oceans, however, are notorious for defiance. While we construct buildings and highways anywhere on land, large bodies of water resist structure and definition. It’s fluid verging on chaotic, and for most designers, never has any element served as a more fascinating muse.

Anchoring its design on the precious malachite stone, a clutch by Aranáz commits to cloth the water’s shifting composition. Malachite stones, it was believed, mirrored the emotions of their bearers, and on them figured rage, gloom, passion, and joy—the violence of waves, or the peacefulness of the sea. We are, after all, bodies made of mostly water, and the stone records our emotions that shift as often as the tides.

The bag, though made of neoprene fabric, allures with its seemingly changing surface: ripples evoking the natural lawlessness of the tides or the waters within us, continually astir. We get lost in the mesmerizing swirls, a mark of nature’s most powerful phantasm, drawing any unsuspecting onlooker down into its dreamlike waves.

Available at Aranáz.

This story was originally published in Northern Living, May 2015.