A bag created by an artist that is smaller than a grain of rice has been sold for a mammoth price. The neon green coloured handbag, based on a popular Louis Vuitton's OnTheGo collection, was sold in an online auction for $63,000 (Rs 51.6 lakh), according to CNN. The US artist collective MSCHF, a New York art collective, has designed the bag.
The bag comes with a microscope and has pockets that are no larger than a speck of dust. With the naked eye, you can hardly see the tiny product. It measures just 657 by 222 by 700 microns (or less than 0.03 inches wide).
The handbag was sold on June 27 in an auction hosted by Joopiter, an online auction house founded by American musician, record producer and designer Pharrell Williams, reported the media house.
A photo of the bag posted by MSCHF on its Instagram page earlier this month had accumulated a lot of views.
"Smaller than a grain of sea salt and narrow enough to pass through the eye of a needle, this is a purse so small you'll need a microscope to see it," read the caption of the image.
"There are big handbags, normal handbags, and small handbags, but this is the final word in bag miniaturisation. As a once-functional object like a handbag becomes smaller and smaller, its object status becomes steadily more abstracted until it is purely a brand signifier," the caption further read.
The bag was made using two-photon polymerization, a manufacturing technology used to 3D-print micro-scale plastic parts. A microscope, equipped with a digital display through which the bag can be viewed, was also provided to the buyer along with the bag.