What is this? A handbag for ants?

This is all in keeping with MSCHF’s history of provocative antics. Officially founded in Brooklyn in 2019 by Wiesner, Gabriel Whaley, Daniel Greenberg, Stephen Tetreault and Lukas Bentel, the collective has long leveraged parody and controversy to comment on the absurdities of consumer culture.

Its drops have included $76,000 “Birkinstock” sandals made from Birkin bags (released with the blessing of neither Birkenstock nor Hermès) and a pair of “Jesus Shoes,” or customised Nike Air Max 97s containing holy water from the River Jordan.

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If those projects allowed MSCHF to poke fun at sneaker culture and organised religion, the microscopic bag trains the brand’s gimlet eye on the luxury handbag market.

When it comes to handbags, size matters. Consider the “ludicrously capacious” Burberry bag considered a faux pas in Succession. Or the teensy Valentino tote that Lizzo carried from the American Music Awards red carpet into the meme stratosphere, or the buzzy micro bag that Jacquemus debuted at Paris Fashion Week in 2019.

And although luxury bags are considered desirable in part because some retain their value, new “it” bags are anointed at a dizzying pace – from more minimal luxury offerings like Prada’s mini Cleo and Bottega Veneta’s “candy”-size Jodie to funkier statement bags like Puppets and Puppets’ cookie bag and Simone Rocha’s micro egg.

MSCHF had been discussing the idea of a miniature handbag for several months when Whaley brought the idea to Andelman during a visit to Paris. She jumped at the chance to offer a less obvious bag than the ones typically available at auction. “Christie’s and Sotheby’s, they have these Hermès bags,” Andelman says. “It’s become so usual, which is scary for me.”

MSCHF approached several industrial manufacturers that specialise in biotechnology, which Wiesner says they found through a combination of asking around and Google. Many said no.

The whole process was an exercise in persuasion, Wiesner recalls, “because you’re going into a production chain that makes stents and asking them to make a sculpture”. Eventually, they got a yes from a manufacturer that he declined to name.

The bag was created out of resin through a process called two-photon polymerization, a kind of 3D printing for microscopic objects. The OnTheGo style was chosen because its design – a simple rectangle with a prominent logo – could be reproduced legibly at such a small scale, Wiesner says. Its bright colour and slight translucence are intended to make it more visible when lit from below on a microscope slide. (According to MSCHF, the bag will be sold in a sealed gel case premounted beneath a microscope with a digital display.)

When samples of the bag arrived a few months ago, they were so small that Wiesner says the team lost some of them. But at least one bag that survived will be on display later this month, affixed beneath its microscope, during Men’s Fashion Week in Paris.

On June 19, it will be auctioned off online to a buyer who Wiesner hopes will not treat it with too much reverence. “I almost hope somebody eats it,” he says.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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