Ice Spice Attends Met Gala with a $6,000 Camera Purse

Rapper Ice Spice caused a stir at the Met Gala on Monday when she arrived with an unlikely accessory on the red carpet — a bejeweled clutch bag seemingly in the shape of an iconic vintage film camera.

Ice Spice carried a bejeweled Judith Leiber clutch that looked a lot like an Argus C3 “Brick” camera as she arrived at the Met Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on Monday evening.

The Argus C3 was a low-priced rangefinder camera that was mass-produced from 1939 to 1966 by Argus, a manufacturer from Michigan.

The camera is purported to be one of the most popular American cameras in history and became a cult classic — selling over 2.2 million units during its 27-year production.

Due to its heavy and chunky appearance, the Argus C3 was affectionately nicknamed the “Brick” by photographers. The series was only discontinued in 1966 when inexpensive Japanese SLR cameras flooded the market and demand for the Argus C3 fell.

The Judith Leiber “camera flash” clutch that the rapper carried looked so much like an Argus C3 Brick camera that social media users speculated that she was carrying the model developed in 1962 — towards the end of its production run.

Ice Spice did little to quash speculation that her Judith Leiber clutch was a real camera. In a red-carpet interview with Vogue, Ice Spice said she was excited to take “some fire pictures” backstage with it.

The Argus C3 was most famously used by 20th-century photographer Tony Vaccaro, who used this camera model during World War II and even developed images in soldiers’ helmets.

This is not the first time that a star has accessorized with a camera at the Met Gala. In 2019, singer Frank Ocean arrived on the Met Gala red carpet with a 35mm Contax T3 camera and shot photos of the event for Vogue.

Update 5/3: After publication, the article was corrected to show that Ice Spice was carrying a camera-shaped Judith Leiber clutch bag.