About
A BIT ABOUT US
Iwona Ash, designer, stylist, and writer, hailing from Krakow, Poland, where she was drawn to design and style projects for film and photography.
She gradually became a writer and journalist for radio RMF, TV, and newspapers. Active in Art & Design, she became an Art Director for International Design Festival “Design Attack,” curating exhibitions for Museums and Galleries. After moving to the USA, she began her career in Los Angeles as an acquisition buyer distributing movies for Film Production Companies worldwide. She never stopped designing, and as a result, she created her own fashion company - Iwona Ash Design LLC featuring a high-end line of handbags and accessories. She has recently created the Iwona Ash Studio offering online fashion, styling, and consulting programs & courses.
Her academic background in Art & Design, with a master’s degree in Sociology and Anthropology and post-grad Art Curating studies.
She works and lives in Venice, California.
How did it start
Your bag tells more about you than anything else! It says what you do, where you are going, what your taste is like, about your financial situation, your mood, your character, and your lifestyle. You can hide in your bag, but you cannot hide your bag from the world. It is out there!
For some reason, I had trouble finding the right bag for me; that’s why I started to design and make bags for myself. With time my project has expanded to making bags for my friends. Thanks to them, I could think and develop bags for special needs and taste and test them. Along the way, I have learned a lot about myself and my preferences. I tend to love leather, but being a vegetarian myself, I had a moral issue with using leather.
So, I started researching what kind of leather I could use for my work without harming animals and what I found entirely changed my perspective on leather. Once an animal has already been killed to produce food, its skin is merely a waste product that would be thrown away therefore wasted. By using it, we are using the whole animal and not wasting this important resource. My moral issue was resolved, but myths about leather are strongly rooted in our culture, and that is why I seek to clarify this misconception. If anyone calls you Cruella Deville because of your leather purse, now you know the truth about how I source my leather!