Fashion · Luxury Launches
The net bag, rebuilt in leather
Polène reworks the humble net bag for summer, weaving it from beads pressed out of upcycled leather.
Some bags arrive as objects. The Solé Nomad arrives as a method. Polène, the Paris house that has spent a decade turning offcuts into design, has taken its Solé silhouette from 2024 and opened it up: a roomier, airier summer bag knotted in the language of macramé, its surface studded with beads that look like pearls and are, in fact, leather.
The name reaches back to soleil, the French word for sun. Worn on the shoulder, the bag reads as free and unfussed, built for the months ahead. It comes in three shades, Porcelain, Tan and Ebony, and is available online for the region.
Quick facts: Polène Solé Nomad. A hand-knotted summer net bag from the circular Plèi collection, made from upcycled leather beads. Three colourways: Porcelain, Tan, Ebony. Available at eng.polene-paris.com.
The object
The net, reimagined
The mesh bag is an old idea. Polène’s version updates it with a knotted, macramé-worked body and a surface of rounded beads, the whole thing detailed with the precision the house brings to its leather. It is open and light, made to be carried loosely and lived in.
The craft
Beads from offcuts
The beads are the story. Polène sorts its leather offcuts by colour, grinds them into a fine, sand-like grain, then binds that with a plant-based polymer. The mixture is injected into a bespoke mould, shaped into organic beads and set with heat, turning scraps of hide into pearl-like elements with their own sheen and final colour.
The palette
Porcelain, Tan, Ebony
Because the offcuts are sorted by shade before they are ground, the colour runs through the material rather than sitting on top of it. The result is three clean options, a soft Porcelain, a warm Tan and a deep Ebony, each carrying the quiet irregularity of something made by hand.
The collection
A collection called play
The Solé Nomad belongs to Plèi, a Polène line whose name is the brand’s own letters rearranged around the word play. The premise is circular: leather that would once have been waste is given a second role, from bags to small leather goods to decorative pieces. It is sustainability treated as design, not as a label.
The season
Made for the heat
Polène first showed the Solé in 2024. The Nomad is its summer expansion, larger and more open, cut for movement and for the long days ahead. On the shoulder it sits easily, the kind of bag that goes from a morning by the water to an evening without changing character.
The house
Paris, by way of Ubrique
Polène was founded in Paris in 2016 and has since opened doors in New York, Tokyo, Seoul, London and Hamburg. Its designs are drawn in a Paris studio and made by hand in Ubrique, the Spanish town known for its leatherwork, where the studio’s sketches are turned into finished objects.
Availability
Online, now
The Solé Nomad is available online at Polène, alongside the wider Plèi collection of leather goods and decorative pieces. For the region, it can be bought directly through the house’s site.
Luxury that keeps its leftovers
For Boujeez, the Solé Nomad is a quiet argument about where luxury is heading. The most interesting houses are no longer measured only by what they make, but by what they refuse to throw away. Polène has taken the part of the process most brands discard, the offcut, and turned it into the most tactile thing in the room. In a Gulf summer built around water, travel and long light, a bag that carries its own conscience as lightly as it carries everything else feels exactly right.
Explore the Solé Nomad at Polène.