Angelique Collections didn’t begin in a fancy design studio or with a big team behind it. It began at her parents’ kitchen table.
After being laid off from her job, designer Angela Boone found herself trying to figure out what came next. She didn’t know it at the time, but losing her job would lead her back to something she had always loved creating.
She started with canvas, magazines, a pair of scissors, and an idea.
Some of Angela’s earliest handbags were one-of-a-kind collage bags, created by taking images and pieces from magazines and turning them into artwork on canvas. She would layer different images, patterns, fashion, textures, and unexpected details together until the canvas became something completely different.
Then she turned that artwork into a handbag.
These weren’t bags designed to look like everything else in the store. They were bold. Some were a little over the top. Some mixed black and white patterns with fashion images, embellishments, bows, hats, faces, and whatever else caught her creative eye.
And that was the point.
She was creating wearable art before she ever started calling it wearable art.
Where It Started
Two of Angela Boone’s early Angelique Collections designs, created using canvas, magazine collage artwork, mixed media, and embellishments.
Looking back at those first bags, you can see something that is still very much a part of Angelique Collections today: Angela never wanted to make the bag everybody else was making.
She wanted someone to look at one of her pieces and ask, “Where did you get that?”
But just a few months after being laid off, life changed again when Angela’s father suffered a stroke.
Suddenly, she was navigating family responsibilities and a completely different season of life while still trying to figure out what her own next chapter would look like.
And through it all, she kept creating.
That kitchen table became more than a place to make handbags. It became the starting point of a journey that would continue to change and evolve over the years.
From Collage Handbags to Angelique Collections Today
As Angela grew as a designer, her work grew with her.
The magazine collages eventually gave way to new techniques, different materials, hand painting, fabric manipulation, leather details, embroidery, and other forms of mixed-media design.
The look changed.
The techniques changed.
But the idea behind the brand never did.
Create something different.
Today, Angelique Collections is known for one-of-a-kind and limited handmade handbags and accessories with their own individual personalities. Even when Angela creates another bag from the same collection, no two pieces have to be exactly alike.
That's intentional.
Because Angelique Collections was never supposed to be about mass-producing hundreds of identical handbags.
It was created for the woman who appreciates something a little different—the woman who doesn't want to walk into a room and see her bag on everybody else's arm.
And the journey hasn't been a straight line.
The brand has grown, slowed down, changed direction, been put aside, picked back up, and reinvented more than once. Angela has evolved right along with it.
But when she looks back at those first collage handbags created from canvas and magazine pages, she can still see the same designer she is today.
A designer willing to experiment.
A designer willing to make something that might not look like what everyone else is making.
And a designer who still gets excited about taking ordinary materials and asking:
“What can I turn this into?”
Angelique Collections may look different today, but its DNA can be traced all the way back to that kitchen table.
A layoff.
A stack of magazines.
Some canvas.
An idea.
And a woman who decided to start creating.
Sometimes the beginning of something special doesn't look special at all.
Sometimes, it just looks like a kitchen table covered with fabric, magazines, scissors, and possibilities.
Angelique Collections
Wearable art. Made by hand. Made to be different.
0 comments