Trash to treasure: artful gear with a conscience

Before moving to Vermont, Genatossio worked in crisis management for Save the Children UK, where she developed sustainable businesses in Sri Lanka, Ecuador, and with the Bangladeshi community in London.

Shopping one day in Brattleboro she found a simpler version of the bags she now designs. Genatossio recalls that when she saw the bag, she thought, "This is a story. Garbage!" She booked a flight to Indonesia and arrived two days after the tsunami hit the region in December 2004. In the chaos, she saw people collecting trash from landfills, and this solidified her vision.

"The idea was to take the original bag I had seen to another level design-wise," said Genatossio. "I looked at luxury designs by Louis Vuitton and things in Vogue. I wanted to integrate what the Indonesians started with high-end design. They needed that economic niche for this to survive as a sustainable project."

Genatossio sends her designs and production orders to a small company in Jakarta that gathers the materials and stitches them.

"They have very talented sewers who used to work for Fendi and Chanel when they maintained factories in Indonesia. When these companies pulled out, only ghost factories were left, along with talented people who can do high-end finishing work," said Genatossio.

The bags use heavy gauge zippers and the interiors are lined with patterned satin fabrics. The exterior is a collage of products in English and Bahasa Indonesia, combining language and color in a way that creates visually interesting cross-cultural references.

"Traveling in Asia, all five senses are working all the time," said Genatossio. "Our products are a microcosm of that, working on many levels linguistically, [and] stylistically . . . and they are useful objects."

Each piece features an individually made collage. Pak Haris, a man identified on the website as "an artist/master tailor/slum-dweller" who crafts Monsoon Vermont's toiletry travel bags, is so inventive that Genatossio asked him to sign his work, which is sold in limited editions.