Former MTV2 veejay and aspiring rapper Amanda Diva has just launched Spectrum Bags, a limited edition line of cotton tote bags featuring hand-painted designs that celebrate hip-hop culture, blackness and Afrocentric fashions. The line consists of five styles (three of which are pictured above), and only six pieces of each style are available — all exclusively at Karmaloop.com.
My absolute favorite is the "Beat Locks Bag," pictured at top, which features a profile view of a smiling brown-skinned lady wearing headphones, with her big, curly, blond Afro bouncing in the wind and a string of musical notes and whimsical swirls floating inside her hair. I love the funky, '80s-style colors Amanda Diva selected for the design, and how it manage to capture the power of music: how those beats and rhymes seep into your bloodstream so you can feel the music reverberating throughout your entire body (all the way to your hair).
The second bag pictured here, the "Boom Bap Bag," meanwhile, features a brighter, more Keith Haring-esque color scheme and, as the name implies, celebrates the old-school, Radio Raheem-style stereo systems with cassette players (in which we'd play our favorite tapes 'til they popped). And lastly, pictured above is the "Royal Fro" bag, which celebrates a black woman's natural beauty and encourages women to rock their Afros with pride and pizzazz (as in, stop patting your weave and decolonize your hair!)
Impressed with Amanda Diva's skills with a paint brush? Then go snatch one of these up before they sell out.
Spectrum Bags by Amanda Diva "The Beat Locks Bag," "The Boom Bap Bag," and "The Royal Fro Bag," $42 each. Visit Karmaloop.com
