India Hicks + Tusting
Celebrating British Design and Craftsmanship
It all began over a year ago, when India approached us to recreate her then fiancé’s much-treasured (but rather tired) old Tusting bag as a wedding present. After many pandemic-related delays, the couple finally tied the knot in September, but the bag was presented in time for the first-planned wedding date, with great success and has inspired India’s designs for this first collaborative collection.
India Hicks
India is a writer, designer, entrepreneur, former international model, humanitarian and mother of 5. Born in London, she is the daughter of celebrated interior decorator David Hicks and his wife Lady Pamela Hicks. She has lived in the Bahamas since 1996, running her own lifestyle brand from there for several years, including designing highly sought-after handbags. So, India definitely has a soft spot for a bag – and a designer’s eye – and when India visited the factory and we got talking, the ideas started to really flow.
India: “When I stumbled upon the opportunity to work with Tusting, I did a little happy dance. It feels right to be collaborating with this very British brand, which has passed through the hands of five generations and all the changes the world has seen in that time, weathering success and scarcity with equal grace.”
Three Globe-Trotting Designs
The result, a very limited collection of three beautiful, yet ultra-functional styles crafted from some of our favourite, high-quality materials, to give bags with our core, Tusting values paired to globe-trotting, super-stylish practicality. Meet the Soleil, the Snatch and the Sail.
Ultra-discreet branding ensures a certain curiosity and as each bag is individually stamped with unique numerals made from India’s own handwriting, every item is a special edition.
Let’s Take Some Pictures
With the design process completed (through all the iterative versions that are always involved when doing something completely new), it was finally time to plan a photoshoot for the new bags. India and her husband David’s beautiful home in Oxfordshire, America Farm, was the obvious choice. It was built just a few years ago, very close to where India grew up, and which is very much a synergistic triumph of their combined design skills and aesthetics, a house that invites you to breath out the moment you walk in.
Stretch Flint Wood
This happy setting was also the pied à tèrre of one small but mighty new addition to the family – Stretch Flint Wood. The miniature sausage puppy never doubted for a moment that he was the star of the shoot and quickly made us all realise that too.
As India points out, he was already an old hand at this: “Stretch arrived a few days before I got married. Can you imagine? The busiest week of my family’s life and we suddenly have a disoriented 6-week-old puppy in our midst. Although I think he enjoyed making his grand entrance that week, he certainly stole the show.”
The Man With The Cam
India had just one call to make for a photographer for the day – none other than David Loftus, whom she first met a few decades ago in Bahamas. This was right around the time she had also just met David Flint Wood. Confiding to David Loftus that this might be ‘the one’, he promised there and then to photograph their wedding should she be right…. fast forward 25 years or so, David Loftus came to our shoot having fulfiled that promise just a few weeks earlier.
We are sorry to say that the collection has now sold out - thank you to everybody who has ordered and for your patience with us getting the orders out. It’s been a truly happy collaboration to bring you these new bags and we’re confident this is just the first chapter.
