The woman at the veg shop is admiring my new ivory padded shoulder bag. Perhaps admiring is the wrong word. “So, is this, like, a thing now?” she says.
“Apparently,” I say. I am old enough to remember declarations of the man bag’s arrival stretching back to the 70s and 80s. While its perennial reintroduction turned it into a fashion cliche, it also reinforced the notion that it would never truly catch on.
Men had devised other ways to cart their stuff about and would remain for ever resistant to the handbag. Then, last July, I was watching news footage of some young men fighting in the streets of an English town. Almost all of them were wearing an identical summer uniform: white T-shirt, shorts and a black cross-body bumbag.
I thought: I have missed something. The latest evolution of the man bag is also a form of extinction: fashionable men have begun to appear in public wearing what we might once have described, for lack of a better term, as ladies’ handbags. Timothée Chalamet pairs a baseball cap with a tiny chain-strap Chanel number .
Harry Styles goes about town with a bamboo-handled Gucci bag . In his debut 2024 spring-summer collection, Pharrell Williams revived the Louis Vuitton Speedy – once the bag of choice for Jessica Simpson and Miley Cyrus – as a menswear accessory. Again, I have missed something.
How can I hope to catch up? Ill at ease as I may be with the idea of sporting a “woman’s handbag”, I am absolutely at sea when it comes to shopp.
