dedepurses.com > News >
Southern Living-featured Designer to Showcase
Original Purses at Chicago-Area Art Shows
July 5, 2006 — Chicago, IL — On July 8-9 at Lincolnshire Art Festival, and July 15-16, at the Buffalo Grove Invitational Fine Art Festival, up-and-coming purse designer Dede Atkins will feature purse designs that caught the eye of Southern Living magazine editors. The June 2006 issue of Southern Living magazine features an exclusive interview with the South Florida artist/fashion designer, along with a photo spread of her signature classic wood-box purses. [ See article ]
“My purses are for those individuals who dare to be different and who don’t mind attention – because they will get it,” said Atkins, who founded the company De-Zines by Dede in 2002. “Whatever purse you wear or carry, people stop to look and comment – even men.”
Last winter, Southern Living discovered dedepurses.com and sent both a photographer and a journalist to Atkins’s studio in Boynton Beach, Florida, to profile the artist, whose purses have evolved to mixed-media designs, including sophisticated and sexy combinations of fur, feathers, ribbons, silk flowers, beads, and mirrors. Each purse’s elaborately hand-crafted interior is a also completely original design, Atkins said. “You’re walking around with a piece of art, yet the unique interior creates a quality of intimacy with yourself – like wearing lingerie under your everyday clothing, you know you have it on and so you just feel beautiful.”
Atkins recently was featured on the trendy Miami-based T.V. show “Deco Drive,” one of top entertainment shows in Florida. Atkins’s purses, known as “dedepurses,” are currently carried in specialty stores throughout the United States including: Boca Raton, Coral Springs, Hollywood, Ft. Lauderdale, Marco Island, and Naples, Fla.; Kittery, Maine; Boston, Mass.; Nashville, Tenn.; Chagrin Falls, Ohio, with boutiques pending in New York and Chicago.
So far, dedepurses have cultivated their growing popularity by word-of-mouth from passionate customers who met Atkins herself at an art show or people who, like the editors at Southern Living, serendipitously came across her Web site www.dedepurses.com. With design names like “Tiramisu,” “Pocahontas,” “Feather Goddess,” and “Bronze Beauty,” dedepurses have found their way over the shoulders and into the hands of thousands of women and counting.
For art show details, to arrange an interview with Atkins, find out more and/or request fit-to-print photos, contact Penelope Love at (561) 543-1500, plove@blueoceanpr.com.
###
