On a recent idyllic Cape Town morning in a sublimely restrained Tonic-designed house on the Atlantic seaboard, Okapi marked a new chapter with the introduction of the Cunard collection — creative director Tiaan Nagel’s debut for the luxury leather-goods brand.
With his characteristic minimalist restraint and deep knowledge of art and design, Nagel has created an inspired first collection. He describes the experience that set everything in motion. “The first image on my board came from a trip with my son. We walked through the reconstructed studio of Constantin Brâncusi, which sits opposite the Centre Pompidou in Paris. What struck me was how the works existed in the round. Some were positioned low, some elevated, some revealed themselves from unexpected angles. It shifted something for me. I began thinking about objects that hold their own in a full 360-degree way, objects that are not dependent on a single viewpoint.”
Brâncusi led to Nancy Cunard, the potent 1920s muse whose colourful life became a central reference point for his work. “I knew nothing about her at first. Then I found this extraordinary photograph by Man Ray — quite unforgiving. Brâncusi made a beautiful sculpture: a cast-bronze portrait of her that hints at many of the elements that I integrated into the design.”
The bag that emerged — the Cunard — carries that artistic dialogue through its construction. Nagel explains the departure from convention in deliberate detail. “So, the first departure point was sculpture and form. Usually, when you design a bag, the gusset is turned inward. It is there to serve a function, to allow the bag to open. We did the opposite. We took the gusset and made it part of the external form, so it pushes outward. It becomes a structural element.”
Cunard herself offered more than a name. Her life, defined by a revolutionary spirit and a refusal to conform, shaped the energy Nagel sought to embed. “She had this gutsy, anti-establishment spirit. She came from a very traditional, wealthy background and chose a completely different path. She championed black artists and culture in 1920s Paris. What she did by that was put a lot of artists on the map and create a lot of platforms for them to be seen. So, in a nod to Nancy, we worked with the ring — she famously wore her bangles stacked high on her arms — and we picked that up in the ‘O’ motif. There’s something about Nancy’s energy that’s a little bit gutsy with a little bit of a personality that I wanted to reflect.”
This spirit finds expression in the circular motif that runs through the design, a subtle echo of Cunard’s stacked bangles. It also lives in the palette. Nagel described this balance with care. “We worked in ostrich, which is an Okapi signature, and we kept the tones muted. So you see these softer colours, elephant grey, putty, walnut.” I loved the oxblood iteration.
The narrative extended into the food installation, created by Johannesburg-based Botanicus founder Johannes van Greunen, who drew directly from Brâncusi’s beautiful language of form — marble, wood and bronze meeting in a composition that felt almost ritualistic, inviting us to move around it and feast our senses in the timeless geometry of light and taste.
From the April 2026 issue of Wanted.
