Until recently, Anne Loquineau was a business school student following the ‘safe’ career path laid out for her since childhood. Her Franco-Chinese parents believed that art was something you did as a hobby, not as a real job.

But today, she’s paint-splattered, sharing a studio with several carpenters in eastern Paris, and creating porcelain handbags for a living.

Wine-purple and iridescent blue glaze pool from the Chinese dragon-shaped handle to the body of the bag, creating a pattern that looks like fish scales. This complexity of colors is something rarely seen in the fashion industry; it’s simply impossible to create with textiles. But this handbag isn’t made from leather or suede, rather from sculpted china, coated with enamel. I’m terrified to hold such a fragile object in my hands.

“You can drop them [meaning the designs with leather stitching] from around a meter-and-a-half [3 feet] without them breaking,” the artist reassures me.

By rounding the outer edges with leather binding, Loquineau managed to create a special construction method that makes this feat possible. “I broke several bags perfecting this,” she says.

For a long time, I wasn’t proud of my heritage; I tended to hide it.”

Loquineau grew up in a rural, formerly industrial town in central France.

“It wasn’t easy, growing up mixed-race in Roanne,” says Loquineau, who just turned 29. “For a long time, I wasn’t proud of my heritage; I tended to hide it.”

“My parents are strict, and pursuing the arts was out of the question, particularly since I had good grades,” she says. Nonetheless, art was all around her at home. Their house was full of Chinese antiques, largely ceramics, that her parents had collected on numerous trips to visit extended family.

Artistic jobs tend to be looked down upon in China, and the French side of Loquineau’s family was very traditional, too. Both of her parents—and her brother—are doctors.

“[My parents] would have liked me to become a doctor, or an engineer,” says Loquineau, who studied economics and attended business school at EM Lyon. After graduating with a dual degree in business and design, she took a marketing apprenticeship with a luxury Parisian cosmetics brand, hoping it would offer some scope for creativity.

Unfortunately, that was not the case. “If I was lucky, I got one creative task per week,” says Loquineau. “It was awful, a real-life ‘The Devil Wears Prada’ office. I left after five months.”

Unemployment gave Loquineau the push she needed to retrain. She enrolled at a lycée professionnel (vocational high school) for two years of ceramics studies.

“People in France often look down on practical [crafts] courses,” she says, “but it’s the best teaching I’ve ever experienced.”

…the Chinese designs of her bags are a way of fusing her two heritages, and finding a sense of belonging.

Loquineau nailed her vision with her first design project: a porcelain handbag. Bringing it to life took much longer, with many china bags shattered to smithereens along the way. The next iteration involved stitching the seams in leather to make the bags sturdier. Then, during a creative residency this past spring in Jingdezhen, China—the world’s porcelain capital—she began to make bags from 100-percent porcelain.

Although many of the imperial factories in Jingdezhen closed in the 1900s, particularly under Mao (1949–54), craftspeople still have workshops all over town. For Loquineau, the Chinese designs of her bags are a way of fusing her two heritages, and finding a sense of belonging. And at last, her parents are proud, too, she says.

In addition to her porcelain bags, Loquineau makes jewelry, tableware, lamps, and mirrors in her workshop, Coeur Kai. The name, which translates roughly to “open heart,” is also a blend of French and Chinese. And although her handbags invoke an “Emily in Paris” sense of style, it’s no reflection on the artist.

“I create for a client that’s nothing like me,” says Loquineau. “I’m no fashionista; I’m a fanny-pack-and-trainers girl, but these bags turn me into a mad inventor.”

All story images courtesy of Anne Loquineau, (c) 2025 Coeur Kai.