Hasta La Ideas

Subversive art collective MSCHF is at it again. This time they’ve taken the piss out of luxury brand Louis Vuitton, by using a nanoscale 3D printer to knock off their OnTheGo tote bag, which retails in the $3,000-$4,000 range.

The LV bag measures 16.1 x 13.4 x 7.5 inches.

MSCHF’s version is a good deal smaller, at just 657 x 222 x 700 microns.

“Smaller than a grain of sea salt and narrow enough to pass through the eye of a needle, this is a purse so small you’ll need a microscope to see it. There are big handbags, normal handbags, and small handbags, but this is the final word in bag miniaturization. As a once-functional object like a handbag becomes smaller and smaller its object status becomes steadily more abstracted until it is purely a brand signifier.”

MSCHF’s Microscopic Handbag sold at auction last week for $63,750. The price included a digital microscope that the unidentified buyer can use to see the bag.

The specific digital fabrication technique MSCHF used is called two-photon polymerization.