Named for the Harvest

The four goddesses behind MALNI's quiet-luxury grape-skin handbags

When I founded MALNI in Dubai, I knew the handbags would be made from the grape. The grape-skin — what the vine leaves behind once the fruit is gathered — became the material at the heart of the house. So when it came time to name each handbag, I didn't reach for letters or numbers. I went looking for the women who, long before any of us, were keepers of the vine.

I found four.

They come from four different worlds — Egypt, Sumer, Rome — separated by deserts and centuries. None of them knew the others existed. And yet across all that distance, each culture imagined the same thing: that the vine, the grape, and the gathering of the harvest were watched over by a woman. Not a king. Not a god of thunder. A woman, close to the earth, tending what grows.

I named the bags for them.

Renen — the one who names
In ancient Egypt, Renenutet was the goddess of grain, of grapes, of the harvest itself. Her shrines stood among the vines. Her likeness was pressed onto the vessels that held the gathering. But what drew me to her most was something quieter: the Egyptians believed she gave each newborn child its true name — its renen — and with that name, a destiny.
The smallest bag in the house carries her name. The one you begin with. The one that names you back.

Gestin — the cycle
Gestin comes from Geshtinanna, a Sumerian goddess whose name means the vine of heaven. She is the oldest of the four — older than Rome, older than almost anything we still say out loud. In her story, she descends into the dark for half the year so that life can return above. The vine that dies back into the earth and rises again. The harvest that ends so it can begin.
That is why the Gestin Art — the one bag I make as a single piece, hand-embroidered and painted, one of one — carries her name. The rarest silhouette, named for the cycle that makes everything else possible. It has a story of its own, which I'll tell elsewhere.
Everything at MALNI is made with this same spirit — in small batches, across every collection, slowly, with respect for what the harvest leaves behind. Made to last, and made to mean something. I would rather make less, and make it well.

Paget — the maker
Paget is the one almost no one remembers. She appears on clay tablets from three and a half thousand years ago — not seated on a throne, not crowned, but in the vineyard. Working.Tending the vines, gathering the fruit, with her hands in the labour of it.
I think about her often. I design every bag, source every material, and oversee every step of the making — though the bags themselves are built by the skilled hands of the atelier. Paget is the goddess of that work.The one who is found among the vines, not above them.

Pomona — abundance
Pomona is Roman, and she has no equal in any other mythology — she belongs to no one else. She was the goddess of the orchard and the fruit trees, and her tool was not a sceptre but a pruning knife. She devoted herself entirely to the flourishing of what grows. Her name lives on in the French word for the fruit she loved: pomme.
She is the largest silhouette in the house. The fullest. The abundance at the end of the season.

A house built from the vine
Four women. Four cultures. One thread running through all of them — the vine, the grape, the gathering of the harvest. It felt right that a luxury handbag house built from grape-skin should carry their names forward.
I didn't invent this connection. It was already there, waiting in the oldest stories we have. I only listened.

— Mariana