I realised I had seven identical tote bags at home when I spent fifteen minutes next to my front door last Tuesday assessing my collection before choosing one to carry today. Seventeen seconds passed where I stood and genuinely tried to remember when I’d started doing this. Not buying tote bags, I know when I started buying tote bags, obviously that’s easy I’ve got my bank statements all spiralcored and colour coded like the rocks of time themselves. I mean carrying around. Did I wake up one day and decide that a certain style of bag was something I felt required of me daily? I hadn’t. Suddenly noticing the exact point my trousers ended each morning and my tote began. The unconscious reach for the same volume of canvas day in day out regardless of its utility. Was wardrobe. It became instinct. And once you notice you’re instincts… there’s no un-noticing them.
Obviously when people ask me whether tote bags are still in style what I really think is neither of those things. What I think is that I don’t think outfits for the majority of us have ever reallyFact is, there’s two forces at work here. Neither of them care about what colour will match your trousers for spring. One is purely literal, what does the bag need to do for you functionally? Will it carry your Goddamn pocket calendar along with your laptop or not? The other is less tangible but equally valid; have you reached the point where you stop seeing it as an accessory at all and start treating it as another appendage? Both of these considerations are far more important than whatever the fashion zeitgeist is dictating is acceptable colour/bag silhouette this season, and I think they’re worth exploring instead of blindly saying yes or no.
The practical argument, which we all know is actually the whole reason
Look, here’s what I spent years mocking other people about in the interests of seeming fashionable: if it fits your life, which almost exclusively means you need a tote. It’s not here because it looked cute and/or hipster enough to rest on our dull designer fed. It’s here because every other bag in the world bites your soul out if you actually Have Things to carry inside it that aren’t lipstick and breathe. I need to fit my laptop, my book I’ll read on the commute, the spare pair of tights because I tore them at 8am on a Tuesday in March and haven’t gotten over it, my water bottle which leaks slightly if you don’t hold it upright, and the cardi I will definitely need as soon as I leave the house and also will definitely not wear.. A nice lady bag will gag on that list. A crossbody will look it square in the eyes and divorce it.
The tote doesn’t care, throw it all in along with your goddamn treadmill.
I went through a phase, which lasted embarrassingly long because everyone I knew was doing it too, of trying to be that person who could get away with really small bags; flapid shoulder bags that contained a phone, wallet and nothing else and have you looked really put together in every photo and actually be barely capable of existing every time you left the house. I remember getting caught in the rain once while carrying one because there was literally no space for an umbrella. Deb watched me wrestle it in my hand like a disgruntled nemesias outside of a cafe and said “why don’t you just get a bigger bag”. She wasn’t suggesting I was clinging to some era of unjustified glamour before tossing me back into the characters like a dissatisfied frenchie. She wasn’t even especially rude about my being last season at all those months, she was being polite.
The crossover point where you stop making sacrifices for the greater outfit is the tote bag, and please don’t feel like that’s a defeat just because some headline said it’ll be on the fashion-death-list again this Summer. **
The habitual argument, and why saying it’s your go-to isn’t laziness
I suspect the second reason I suddenly spent so long staring into my tote shrine by the front door is the reason most of us own more than one. There was a point where I didn’t decide totes were my bag anymore, they just stopped feeling like a decision. You reach for your coat before you’re fully awake, you grab your keys on autopilot when you leave the house. Grab your tote doesn’t mean it flatters what you’re wearing. Half the time my canvas companion has accompanied outfits that were basically tailor telling on himself with his eyebrows. But it works. It doesn’t challenge me because it doesn’t have to.
Someone somewhere decided it was practical and millions of copycat bags later I am not the person who needs to weigh up all of the benefits and disadvantages of every item in my wardrobe every.single.morning. Some of us tote, some of us don’t. Those that do are probably not doing it because a stylist told us to, chances are we’re on a spectrum of habit.
And honestly, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. Please allow me to alienate the completists who will read this and judge me for having three words in my regular morning vocabulary that don’t begin with either fabric or style right now. Having a habit isn’t rejecting style, it’s what happens when you wear something so often it stops your brain interrogating the decision every.single.time. I don’t decide whether to wear socks in the morning either, and we don’t see articles about whether socks are still in fashion do we? Once something works for you that well, it stops being a conscious choice. It just is.
What maybe is worth debating is what you do when your habit stops serving the life you lead. If your job no longer requires you to schlep a laptop and weights round town and you’re just going to pubs and picking up Nandos then maybe clinging to a hefty tote out of sheer inertia is something worth reconsidering. Not because tote bags have fallen out of favour but because you may haveallowed your habit to overstay its welcome. That, my friends, is the only “are things working” question I’ll entertain. Not ‘is every colour of tote written off by scarf associative “fun’ by Article x in the current periodical of “things Lorent will hate watches’ trust me, snores nothing about that, but are you actually living the life you haul that bag around for day in, day out?
TLDR? I don’t think tote bags are going anywhere, and I don’t think you should feel bad that you grab one every day without thinking about it either. Mine doesn’t make a statement about my outfit anymore and I stopped lying to myself that it did years ago. It just works. With everything. Sure eventually stops being about what looks good and starts being about what works. I’m cool with that.
