Out Of Curiosity, How Does One 'Ethically Source' A Human Spine?
We have to assume a human spine costs more than five grand, and that's before labor costs.
For those of us working from home, "high fashion" isn't exactly at the top of everybody's priorities. Sweatpants are the standard now. Accessories? Yeah, even wearing socks is a tall ask at this point. Which makes this a great time to talk about what might be the freakiest handbag ever stitched together.
Behold:
That -- that can't be real, can it? A futile, but hopeful question. The bag was apparently designed by Arnold Putra, a designer and "Rich Kid of Instagram" out of Indonesia. The Instagram post claims it's a child's spine who had osteoporosis (How kind of him to specify.). You might also note that the post was made in September of 2016, so it's not exactly super fresh, but it's resurfaced recently on Twitter and has gotten people ready to make up for lost beingabsolutelyhorrified-time.
So to verify it, Insider actually contacted Putra to find out what was up. Putra revealed that the spine bag was on an account run by someone else, but that he'd contributed to the page. And yes, the spine was real. The detail they couldn't get out of Putra -- nor any of the doctors they apparently contacted for confirmation -- was whether it belonged to a child or not. Those doctors were pretty certain it was a real spine, they just couldn't determine an age. All Putra would reveal was that, contrary to previous news reports, he didn't go trade with some tribal group somewhere for it. Rather, it was, quote, "medically sourced from Canada with papers." He wouldn't, however, show those papers, because they were subject to a non-disclosure agreement. If you're signing NDA's to get human spines, it might be time to reevaluate your life choices.
And while we also can't speculate on how exactly how much it cost to get a spine from Canada, there are reports that he was trying to sell the bag in 2016 for around $5000. We're not exactly on the up and up with black-market body part pricing (Not after our incident with Sergio.), but we have to assume wayyyyy more than five grand went into making this thing. A cursory Google search for alligator tongue, which is the other key component of the bag, is listed at about $30/pound, so the bag portion alone is probably a few hundred bucks at the absolute minimum. You'd have to imagine this was a fairly labor-intensive custom project too, so that's gonna cost you as well.
We'll just come right out and say it -- we don't think you can "ethically source" a human spine for under $5,000. If that bag showed up in a Party City in late September, plenty of people would maybe spend about $15 on it as a high-end trick-or-treat bag for a kid who's an abnormally big Tim Burton fan, but that's about it.
