Bamboo decor’s stalks are deeply rooted in fashion. And fashion, as it often does, began with scarcity. In 1947, postwar leather shortages pushed Gucci to look elsewhere — specifically Japan, where they imported bamboo, then scorched and shaped it into what would become the house’s signature: handbag handles spotted on the arms of Hollywood starlets, Princess Diana, and eventually — everyone else.
It was fashion first, interiors later. The motif wasn’t about bamboo in its raw, natural form, but rather its stylized potential — luxury, filtered through a kind of East-meets-West cultural shorthand.
