In 2018, Prada collaborated with Taiwanese-American artist James Jean and released a collection of bags, wallets, and apparel featuring bunnies and floral swirls. The bunnies came in two colours, pink and green. The bags piqued my interest right away, but I couldn’t really afford anything from the line back then. The other issue was that there weren’t any Prada stores in my country anyway.
I occasionally looked up the collection over the years just to see what would turn up and gaze wistfully at the pictures. I particularly liked going back to the old dedicated thread on the PurseBlog forum here to look at what other people had bought. It had seemed that the window to acquire one of these fun little bags had closed for good. They were limited edition after all, and 2018 was a long time ago. You snooze, you lose, and all that jazz.
One evening in December 2022, while lying in bed bored, I googled the bags yet again on a whim. This time, my search yielded results. There was a local listing of a leather pouch with pink bunnies on IG. It was used but still looked to be in mint condition, so I reached out and arranged to meet the seller. I still remember the excitement of getting in the car after work and driving to their house, which was quite a distance away. I walked out of their house with my new bag that day, feeling giddy (despite my wallet feeling conspicuously lighter than before I went in) and like a child whose Christmas present came early.
On to the photos!
Pictured with the card. I believe the seller said she bought it in KL. I don’t know why, but the bag feels more and more special to me with every passing year. There’s a certain quality about it now, akin to that of something that ages like wine. This model may have been released only seven years ago (as opposed to decades or geological epochs), but that’s still a pretty long time since it came into existence.
It took me a while to warm up to the logo placement (why blue with pink? I had wondered). Over time, I accepted it as a bold artistic choice that I could respect. Why not blue with pink?
The illustration itself has so much bunny charm – I just love how that one bunny has its paw on its buddy’s back. It also looks like it’s about to fly away with its ears, so that’s another +1. Speaking of ears, look at how there are bunnies with uppy ears and ones with varying stages of lopped ears.
I got the idea to take this shot of the bag with this poster because it was a visually interesting play on similarities and contrasts. Both contained bunnies and floral elements, but the colour schemes were inverses of each other; one had pale bunnies on a pink background, and the other had pink bunnies on a light background.
This is what the back looks like. To tell you the truth, it feels a little too abstract for my tastes. But that’s all right.
Admittedly though, despite it being my 1st or 2nd most favourite bag, I have my reservations about bringing it out regularly. One: it’s cream-coloured and I’m so afraid of getting stains on it that can’t be removed. (Once at dinner I dribbled curry sauce onto a white pebbled leather bag in my lap. All subsequent attempts to brush the stain out, remove it by chemical means, and dab over the remaining flecks of food pigment with a needle dipped in white-out failed spectacularly. In that moment it felt like I was channeling Mr. Bean in that movie where he ruined the painting of Whistler’s Mother and made the stain progressively worse the harder he worked to restore it. But I digress.) Two, it doesn’t fit much beyond a cardholder and a phone in the main section, so it’s less convenient for running errands. There is a small pocket inside that can just about fit my house and car keys.
Having said that, I always feel happy when I do take it out, and it’s a cute little statement piece that holds all my essentials when I don’t need to carry more. One day in the distant future and when the stars are aligned, I hope to come across the matching top handle bauletto bag from this collection!