Quentin Jones – Chelsea Arts Festival tote bag
In the bag
The Chelsea Arts Festival is an annual celebration of the arts and culture taking place over four days in venues across Chelsea. You’ll find outdoor performances, talks with notable creative figures and food and craft markets. This year it will include Susie Cave in conversation with Bella Freud, Rambert dance company, Gavin Turk on the history of rubbish in art and A Night of T/Reason: Celebrating 50 Years of Punk. For her part, Quentin was asked to design a tote bag for the festival, which she did, taking inspiration from the messy energy of punk combined with her own signature style of collage. The bags are available from the Chelsea Arts Festival site, with £l from each bag sold going to The Wings of Hope Children’s Charity and £l going to Create Arts, Chelsea Arts Festival‘s official charity.
We asked Quentin about the commission:
Can you talk us through the process of designing the bag?
The starting point was the Chelsea Arts Festival celebrating 50 years of punk this year. I started looking at old punk zines, the way paint and collage were used, and punk make-up and styling. I was also playing with the idea of turning a face into a mask, which is something that has come up in my work for years.
And then, obviously, I had to think about it as something you’d actually want to carry around on a bag. So it needed to work as an image from a distance, rather than becoming too intricate or precious.
What were the inspirations behind your design?
Punk zines and graphics, painted faces, make-up, collage and masks. I liked the DIY quality of punk imagery – things being cut up, painted over, scribbled on and reassembled. That language feels quite close to the way I naturally work anyway, so I wanted the design to sit somewhere between punk and my own visual world.
Was punk among your influences growing up?
I definitely went through a bit of a punky phase. Some of my earliest concert-going was Green Day, Skunk Anansie, No Doubt and Madness. I actually lost a shoe at a Green Day concert after being thrown around in a mosh pit as a 14-year-old girl, which sounds absolutely terrifying to me now.I then went through a much longer skate and skate-culture phase, which was definitely punk-adjacent — that whole DIY visual language and attitude was probably quite formative.
Was it purely a stylistic thing for you or did you listen to the music?
I listened to the music too, although when I was designing the bag I didn’t go down a huge punk music rabbit hole. A lot of the music I listen to in the studio probably has punk energy in one form or another, but for this I was more interested in the visual language around punk – the zines, make-up, clothes, graphics, and attitude.
Do you listen to music while you work, and if so, what would be on your playlist?
Constantly. I have lots of playlists for getting myself into different moods. Weirdly, I really like working to melancholy music. I have a playlist that is literally just called “:(” which is full of various forms of beautiful sadness – Radiohead, Regina Spektor, Portishead, James Blake.
Is Chelsea an area you spend time in when you’re in London?
My husband grew up in Chelsea, so I actually spend quite a bit of time there now. Growing up, though, hardly ever. I grew up in Camden, which felt like pretty much the other side of the universe.
Although Storm, my first modelling agency, was on the King’s Road, so between about 16 and 18 I did spend quite a lot of time around Chelsea, slightly fascinated by how different it felt from the London I knew.
London is so tribal, and I’m very happy I grew up somewhere where going east felt as natural as going west — both geographically and in terms of the different sorts of people and worlds you move between.
What are some of your favourite spots?
My husband’s dad had a favourite Italian restaurant around the corner from his house called Ziani’s, so I have a real soft spot for that. Whenever he took us there it was usually for some sort of celebration – a birthday, or because we hadn’t seen him for a while – and we always had the best time.
He would order a different bottle of wine for every course and then lemon sorbet drowned in vodka for dessert. He and his friends really knew how to have a good time. So Chelsea for me is quite tied up with memories of those lunches and dinners.
Did you ever visit Vivienne Westwood’s World’s End store in the Kings Road?
Sadly, no!
If you were in London for the festival, would there be anything in particular you’d like to attend?
I’d definitely want to go to A Night of T/Reason at the Saatchi Gallery – particularly the conversations around the collision of music, fashion and punk. And I’d love to see Jane Ashley’s punk photographs.
And finally, what would you keep in your tote?
I mostly use tote bags for going to the farmers’ market at the weekend, so probably an enormous bunch of wildflowers and branches sticking out of the top, a loaf of polenta sourdough, a bag of tomatoes and some fresh fish. And likely the remnants of whatever cookies I’d bought for my kids.