Uselding Fridays
Behind The Brand
BY EMMA GEARY
Joshua McGarvey’s lifelong artistic experiment turns toward luxury handbags.
Joshua McGarvey’s creative journey defies easy categorization. As the designer behind Uselding Fridays, McGarvey operates at the intersection of art, sustainability, and storytelling. His background in fine arts, paired with his instinct for experimentation, has shaped a brand that is as conceptually rich as it is visually striking.
McGarvey’s journey into textiles started over a decade ago, spurred by his first solo exhibition, “Dressing the Future in my Humility,” where he recreated and distributed 107 copies of turquoise sweatpants he had once worn—and infamously wet himself in—during a kindergarten performance of The Three Little Pigs.
“Sharing that moment opened up so many conversations where visitors shared their own moments of vulnerability, and I saw how I could create connections through textiles. I’ve always considered my work to be a grand experiment that allows me to pivot between art and a product that people can live with,” McGarvey explains. This early exploration of textiles and shared experience led him to experiment further, making costumes for his video projects and ultimately, designing pieces that blended personal narrative with wearable art under Uselding Fridays.
His approach mirrors his broader artistic philosophy: embracing fluidity between mediums and meanings with sustainability at the forefront. Handbags became a natural evolution of his work, with each bag created entirely by hand in McGarvey’s studio—from sourcing textiles to crafting, photographing, and promoting them, he does it all.
In recent years, the global fashion community has trended toward building worlds around their products through immersive in-person experiences and digital campaigns. World-building is something that’s come naturally to McGarvey since the start though, thinking holistically about his work as a larger meditation on toggling identities and the malleability of materials.
A prime example of his world-building approach is the ‘KeyBag,’ which originated from his 2022 installation at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, “Posturing.” The green-screen material was originally used for projecting imagined worlds in film and has since evolved into the material behind the first handbag, embodying sophisticated style and elegant reuse. Each Key Bag comes with an authentication card linking to a secret video and a vintage science fiction novel from Joshua’s personal collection. To launch the collection, Joshua collaborated with creatives from across the Twin Cities to experience the new collection with a show at the experimental venue, Tell Space, this past winter.
His forthcoming collection explores the complex cultural associations of camouflage, infusing hunting camouflage and traditional military patterns with the ideas of subversion, ownership, and nature. “I found all these weird pins and keychains that cover the bag,” he says. “It’s playing with identity—who would carry a camo bag now that it’s trendy? It’s about owning the weirdness of it.”
To bring this collection to life, McGarvey collaborated with artist friends, including filmmaker Walter Smits. “Walter filmed themselves wearing blaze orange camo with my bag and a Nerf gun, walking through the woods at their family’s cabin—it’s funny and strange but also beautiful,” McGarvey says. He created a promotional video for the bags using Jack London quotes that he rewrote to become gender-neutral, continuing to play with the idea of wilderness.
Though originally from Indiana, McGarvey has found a home in Minnesota, drawn by the creative energy and support for independent artists. “The arts feel more accessible here. Whether you’re making one-off t-shirts or making videos, there is an engaged community.”
For McGarvey, Uselding Fridays remains a space for experimentation. It’s an ongoing dialogue between past and present, art and function, the conceptual and the everyday. As long as he’s still discovering and pushing the boundaries of what a bag can be, the experiment will continue.
Emma Geary
Emma is Collective Magazine’s Editor-in-Chief and LAB’s Brand + Editorial Manager. She loves getting lost in a story and is sharing her own on her Substack, Hot Girl Walk. Find her staring at the sun on her daily lap around Lake of the Isles.
