Multi-hyphenate Anastasia Komar Breaks Boundaries With Forms Handbag Collection

“The experience of growing up in a reclusive environment is deeply embedded in my practice,” says Anastasia Komar, who’s from Kaliningrad and spent her childhood on the shore of the Baltic Sea, when asked about influences. Today, that aesthetic manifests in environments, furniture, and handbags that lie at the intersection of design and sculpture, the metaphysical and the tactile. Her firm Forms has designed exhibitions for Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, public and residential projects in New York, where she’s now based, and, since 2013, a year after Komar graduated from the Moscow Architectural Institute, handbags, which, although small in scale, have a monumental quality. Each is handmade of Spanish leather, in styles that play with perception. The Houndstooth collection, for instance, reinterprets the traditional Scottish check in three dimensions. Fluid is more philosophical. “It expresses the immensity of singular moments, the fast pace of modern life, and how everything melts together, flowing from the highest of highs to the lowest of lows,” says Komar, who always travels with her Fluid backpack.