Carried away with enchantment

"Go with me to an enchanted kingdom of urban knights, metropolitan magicians, and sparkling fairies. There you may find the handbag which can contain all of your secrets." So opens Laura Rosnovsky's catalog of handbags.

Rosnovsky creates these bags in the deepest recesses of her imagination, and produces them in the heart of Delhi, where she has been living for the last few years. She adores tales of fairies and knights, and looks herself like a tiny sprite dressed as a princess. At our Tel Aviv meeting, during her latest brief visit to her ancestral home, Rosnovsky wore a long Indian skirt in a forest green shade, a matching embroidered tank top and long necklaces. Rosnovsky designs these necklaces in a romantic-wild look, with silk flowers embroidered in pink and green and beads encased in twists of silver wire. Her necklaces and bags are sold in exclusive stores in London, such as Liberty and Cross, and in the lavish Bon Marche department store in Paris.

"I like to transform embroidery into beads, and to work with contrasts, soft materials like fabric and hard materials like glass, wood, and metal - to create an eclectic event," says Rosnovsky. On her shoulder, she carries a sumptuous brown bag featuring the floral motif of her next winter collection. "The bags are made of fabric because, in my opinion, it is a friendlier material than leather. I have a slight conflict regarding the latter. I can play with fabrics, and India is a fabric superpower."

Rosnovsky, a Moscow native, immigrated to Israel with her family when she was 7 years old. Her father is the team physician of Israel's all-star soccer league and her mother is a violinist in the Israel Philharmonic. "At first, it was traumatic," she says. "A little Russian girl with braids and ribbons lands directly in the Be'er Sheva heat. I saw camels for the first time in my life. After six months, we moved to Bat Yam and later to Tel Aviv. I did ballet, played violin for seven years and always painted." She attended the Herzliya Gymnasia high school, served in the intelligence corps of the army and studied industrial art at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design for a year before she decided to move to London.

"My lack of belonging became an advantage, because it freed me from an obligation to be angry, and made it possible for me to choose what was right for me," she says. "I love and admire Israel. I feel my heart is here, but to develop a real sense of belonging, I needed to leave in order to choose to be here again."

Rosnovsky was accepted at the St. Martin's School of Art and began to support herself by designing jewelry. Perhaps it is internal freedom or open limits that allowed Rosnovsky to take impressive, often unplanned, advantage of her hidden talents to realize her potential without fear.

After four years of studying art, she returned to Israel and established the Paganka company. Here she designed and produced clothing for five years, until she decided to sell her half of the partnership to embark on a journey. "A search for answers that were more authentic, on all levels," she says, "aesthetic, cognitive and spiritual. I was looking for something that would surprise me - new angles and understanding. I wanted to disengage from the familiar, from limiting conditions, and the need to constantly produce results. I wanted to increase my repertoire."

Indian chaos

Rosnovsky traveled to India, "without knowing at all where I was going," she says. "I traveled for a year and a half. India amazed me. The pluralism and the chaos, the colors and the scents. After a year and a half, I wanted to do something, and I started to visit local tailors. I made a shirt here, a bag and some jewelry there. A dialogue ensued which was transformed into a collection, in which I tried to embrace both poles - the East and the West. I try to see it as one. A friend I met on the journey took a few of my bags to sell in Vienna. They sold immediately to a store, and soon there were more orders. The buyer for the store contacted me several months later, and she later began marketing the bags in Germany and Austria."

Rosnovsky found herself in India, producing handbags while attempting to establish manufacturing infrastructure. She decided to call on her brother, Yuval, 28, and an attorney by profession, "who always believed in me, and decided to found a business with me." The business was established by the Rosnovsky siblings two and a half years ago in Delhi, where they have lived ever since.

"Delhi is a city of clerks. At first it makes a grayish impression, but when you enter into it more deeply, you find that there is a lot happening. There are a lot of journalists living there, authors and poets who create a Western community in this utterly surrealistic space," Rosnovsky says. "Our business actually started with my brother's visit. At first, he hated India. He asked me what I was doing here, and what made India attractive. And then he started to travel, and gradually fell in love.

"He helped me produce the first shipment of bags to Germany, while gnashing his teeth. But when he returned to Israel, he suddenly missed India and decided to return. He saw potential in India and decided to establish an entrepreneurial office to assist all sorts of companies that want to enter the local market, alongside the establishment of our joint handbag manufacturing company."

Looking inward

Rosnovsky employs an approach of looking inward to create her bags. In her opinion, this permits her to search for authentic, personal answers "and to be ourselves, as fashion now permits. A bag has to be a meeting of function and decoration. I attempt to find the correct mixture of the need for beauty, and the need for function. A bag is a personal item. It contains our secrets, but it is also a functional accessory which carries some of our identity. I try to take this to a place of emotional experience, so that someone who sees the bag will feel something. I want to introduce fairy tale into the everyday - enchantment into routine," she says.

The bags are now available at the comme il faut chain in Israel, at prices that range between NIS 1,000-1,500. Significant sales in Japan, as well as London and Paris, make Rosnovsky's bags a tangible success. All are made from (high-tech) microsuede blends that create an engaging three-dimensional reality that is the product, according to Rosnovsky, of industrial art training at Bezalel.

The collection of bags includes the "Forget Me Not," a brown bag with turquoise forget-me-not flowers, with a melancholy beauty sure to fill the heart of the romantic spirit; the impressive "Heroine" bag with intricate applications in the knightly style, in dusky rose and poison green; the "Magic Box," a dramatic, rectangular purse in brown and black, in the knightly style so loved by the designer, with the addition of studs and metal chains, that approaches the Gothic and the "Muse," in which Rosnovsky's style takes a soft, feminine turn.