Momaboma’s Rags of Wonder

Elsa Schiaparelli may have used fabric with prints of newspaper articles for her avant-garde designs, but Italian designer Maurizio Longati decided that only original articles and iconic Italian adverts from the ‘50s and ‘60s would have done for his accessories.

A casual encounter in India with a soaking wet concrete bag, inspired him a series of small accessories made with vintage magazines and, after further experiments, he developed more avant-garde designs based on two principles, quality and affordability, using tailor’s measuring tapes, ’50s Navy rucksacks and parachutes.

In just five years Longati’s Momaboma project turned into a successful venture that produces in its Italian laboratories over 20,000 pieces a year and has even become the subject of courses, workshops and exams at fashion institutes across Italy.

What inspired you to start producing bags and accessories with such unusual materials?
Maurizio Longati: In 2004 I spent almost a year working in India. One day I was at a factory specialised in embroideries and outside there was a terrible monsoon. It was raining very heavily and I stumbled in a concrete sack that was lying on the ground. These sacks usually feature an internal polypropylene net that protects concrete from humidity. I picked it up and realised the sack hadn’t broken, so I took it inside the factory and decided to fashion a bag out of it for my partner Claudia. I did something very basic, a tube-shaped bag, so I just cut a rectangle out of the sack, added two circles and a couple of handles and sewed it all together. When Claudia saw it she thought it was beautiful since she felt the bag had a sort of emotional value and contained in itself all the suffering of the people in India. We started designing further bags, producing them all in Italy and eventually got the first orders from a popular Bologna-based shop. 

Do you feel that the materials used for the Momaboma accessories give them a sort of ‘added value’?
Maurizio Longati: Yes, I do. Even though I designed bags using old concrete sacks and even air chambers of used tires, recycling wasn’t the main point. My main aim was indeed doing something emotionally important. I guess that selecting old pages from vintage newspapers and magazines and reusing them could maybe be defined as “romantic recycling”. You can’t really reprint or use photocopies of fashion magazines or comics from the 50s as they wouldn’t communicate the same emotions original pages can communicate. Besides, I’ve always admired Italian illustrator, cartoonist and graphic designer Armando Testa and the Pop Art-like ripped posters made by Italian artist Mimmo Rotella and felt inspired by their works. I liked the idea of creating something from papers and rags, assorted materials that people usually throw away as I wanted my final design to incorporate little pieces of history and emotions inside. For example, we recently employed for our bags marked tests of children from a Sicilian secondary school, because we felt they expressed a wide range of anxieties and emotions. We sort of applied the same concept also to our jewels that were born out of a personal passion I share with my partner Claudia. Amber inspired our jewels: this resin traps insects and freezes time back to million of years ago, and we decided to incorporate pieces of newspapers in plastic pieces so that in fifty year’s time people will still be able to own a bangle or a necklace with a little piece of history inside. 
 
You have recently launched a special project entitled MyMomaboma that allows customers to send you and your team of designers and craftsmen their favourite magazines, photographs, sketches and notebooks and see them turned into emotionally fashionable bags and small accessories. What has been the best feedback you have ever received about a MyMomaboma bag you created?
Maurizio Longati: The MyMomaboma project allows me to turn into the personal designer of a customer’s emotions because it’s the customer who tells us what to use, from love letters to plane, museum or concert tickets. We usually get very moving feedback when we do these projects: a while back we made a bag for a girl who was getting married using pages from old diaries that belonged to her friends and on which she had scribbled and sketched away as a teenager, and she was really moved by it. 

Have you recently been working on any particular project using unusual materials?
Maurizio Longati: I have been working on a series of bags using newspapers with images of Presidents of the United States, from Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama. I was in the States when Obama was elected and I brought back home 250 newspapers, published on the 4th and 5th of November, from The New York Times and USA Today to The Wall Street Journal. I felt I brought back home Obama’s winds of change and wanted to inject a bit of American history into our accessories. These bags won’t be on sale, though, but they will be part of a sort of art project. I’m also working on a line of bags dedicated to music, a sort of tribute to Richard Curtis' The Boat That Rocked, using vintage images from the 60s-70s. 

What are your future plans for Momaboma?

Maurizio Longati: Momaboma is a sort of lifestyle and I would like to apply the same concept behind the bags also to shoes and glass frames. My background is in architecture, though, so I’m planning to maybe employ the Momaboma philosophy to interior design and further customisation projects.

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