Fashion your seatbelts

Colorful, durable bags and totes are a stylish life-saver

By Rebecca Ostriker, Globe Staff, 9/25/2003

Tough and pretty. That's how a lot of women want to look. So what kind of carry-all goes with that? Strap yourself in, sister: Three designers are setting hearts racing with handbags made of seat-belt material.

The Harveys Original Seatbeltbag is woven out of seat-belt straps in your choice of 12 tints: Ferrari red, Lexus gold, Cadillac blue, Gremlin green, Limo black, Pinto orange, Delorean silver, Buick brown, and the like. Husband and wife Dana and Melanie Harvey, a 30-something pair based in Orange, Calif., came up with the idea for the bags when they were restoring his 1950 Buick and had a roll of seat-belt strapping left over. Once they started making them, they had to quit their day jobs to keep up with the demand.

These bags can take 2,000 pounds of pressure ("That's the official rating for the belts," says Dana Harvey, who notes that they get the straps from the same suppliers as US automakers). Shiny and sleek, the Seatbeltbags come in 12 sizes -- from cosmetics clutches to totes, messenger bags, backpacks, overnighters, and even briefcases -- at prices ranging from $33 to $132. Head out on the open road and buy one at Jasmine Sola on Newbury Street or in Harvard Square, or visit the Harveys' website at www.seatbeltbags.com.

Holly Aiken wears her love of retro racing colors on her -- well, her handbags. Aiken, a 29-year-old designer from Raleigh, N.C., makes her Arc Clutch out of the same polypropylene webbing used in seat belts, dyed black with red and sand-colored racing stripes and a loop for carrying. That's also seat-belt material in the straps on her Airborne Messenger bags and her Moto and Turbo Totes, which are cut from industrial-upholstery vinyl in mod, Mondrian color combinations: white vinyl with wedgewood, slate-blue, and black stripes, or chocolate with pink and orange geometric appliques, for example.

Aiken says she gets inspiration from a friend's vintage racing-jacket collection and from "daily things, like laundry detergent bottles in the dime store." As for her materials, the vinyl is so tough, she says, "anything wipes off it. You can clean it with Ajax." Aiken's bags, costing $38 to $160, are available at www.hollyaiken.com.

From Switzerland come the Freitag Freeway Bags. These messenger bags, backpacks, and handbags are created almost entirely from recycled materials: waterproof truck tarpaulins for the body, seat belts for the straps, and bicycle inner tubes for the trim. Each bag is one-of-a-kind, with the tarp's commercial logos and colors creating patterns that look like abstract art once the material is cut and shaped.

Markus and Daniel Freitag, brothers in their early 30s, are the designing men behind these urban-chic talismans, which have spread across Europe to American shores. If you can't make it to their New York store, visit the website at www.freitag.ch, where you can pick out a bag from hundreds on view or create your own from scratch, positioning the cut-out templates on a tarp of your choosing and seeing the resulting product immediately (try it to see how fun it is). "Call us up while you're online, and our vendor can even give you a unique Freitag live-cam high-altitude private home-shopping tour," the Freitags promise on their website (you can almost hear the Swiss accent). Freeway Bags cost $79 to $146.