kara and the chainmail bag
A plain-English guide from preon.store. We are not affiliated with any brand mentioned — this is editorial.
Every few decades, metal mesh comes back. In the 2010s and 2020s it came back as the crystal mesh bag — a small chainmail pouch scattered with crystals — and the label most associated with that revival is KARA. If you have fallen for the chainmail look, this guide covers where it comes from, how the construction actually works, and the wider metal-mesh family it belongs to.
KARA, briefly
KARA is a New York accessories label founded by Sarah Law. It is widely known for its crystal mesh bags — chainmail-style bags whose links carry small crystals, so the whole surface catches light as it moves. The design became one of the recognisable it-bags of its era and pulled a very old construction back into the mainstream: metal, linked small enough to drape.
Chainmail is older than fashion
The construction itself is armour. Chainmail — thousands of individual rings, each linked through its neighbours — was built to stop blades while letting a body move, and that combination of strength and flexibility is exactly what makes it seductive as an accessory. Fashion's modern claim on it runs through Paco Rabanne's 1960s metal dresses, which treated linked metal as a fabric, and further back through the 1920s mesh purses of Whiting & Davis — the American maker whose stamped-plate mesh evening bags are still the classic vintage buy. Our guide to buying vintage Whiting & Davis covers that end of the family.
Why the look endures
Metal mesh does something no other material does: it is hard and liquid at once. A chainmail bag pours over a table edge, sounds faintly like rain when you pick it up, and reflects light in moving points rather than a single sheen. It photographs beautifully, which is part of why each revival spreads faster than the last. And because the construction is genuinely old, the look reads as reference rather than novelty — armour, flappers, disco, all at once.
Chainmail is one branch of a bigger family
Linked rings are not the only way to make metal behave like cloth. Whiting & Davis mesh is technically tiny stamped plates joined on wire links; and knitted wire mesh takes a different route entirely — one continuous fine wire looped like knitting yarn, so the finished bag is a sheer metal fabric with no individual rings at all. The constructions look related but feel different in the hand: weight, drape, sound and transparency all change. We compare them properly in chainmail vs knitted mesh.
If you love the chainmail look
The honest advice: if what you want is specifically the crystal mesh bag, buy the crystal mesh bag. But if what draws you is the wider idea — metal that drapes, an object closer to jewellery than to leather goods — the family is larger than one label. Vintage mesh purses are the archival route, and knitted-wire bags are the contemporary sibling: lighter, quieter, semi-transparent, and made to age into a patina rather than stay uniformly bright.
Where preon.store fits in
We are an independent UK brand and we make exactly one bag in this family: Tonsiba (£95) — a tote knitted from fine brass wire with twin riveted handles, 22 × 22 cm, made to order and dispatched within 14 days, with free UK delivery and worldwide shipping. It is the knitted-wire branch of the chainmail family tree. If you are weighing one up, start with what is a brass bag and knitted wire bags, and the FAQ covers shipping and returns.
Last reviewed: 2026-07-29