In the midst of the 2023 Hollywood writers’ strike, Cleo Camp, a young costume designer in Los Angeles, found herself with far too much time on her hands. She brought out an industrial Juki she’d received for her birthday and began sewing for the first time in years. The materials, a pile of silver leather scraps, came from a shoemaker’s studio in Hollywood. “I started patterning and sewing silver leather bags for friends, and, eventually, friends of friends,” she says. “Strangers started D.M.-ing me asking, Is that a Cleo Bag? Where do I get one?”
She priced the bags at $148 to cover new materials and an hour of her time, though each of them took about four hours to make. (Spoiler alert: they now retail for $428.) By the end of 2023, Camp had sold 300 silver totes, each with a signature teardrop handle. Most importantly, she’d found a new calling. “The Cleo Bag changed my life,” says the 29-year-old designer. “[It’s] where my story as a fashion designer started.”
