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 shopping for one. I have pictures on my phone of popular women’s bags being worn by men, but I am incapable of discerning whether any of the bags on the shelves in the stores are a suitable match. They all look the same to me. I am beginning to perspire in TK Maxx. I think I may be bag blind.
Finally, I track down a shearling bag in the women’s department of M&S that seems to fit the bill. Without trying it on, I take it to the till.
“Do you need a bag for your bag, or are you just going to carry it?” asks the saleswoman.
“Oh no, I need a bag,” I say.
Elsewhere on the high street, I source a black cross-body bag that looks like something you could fight in on a hot night to celebrate England losing a vital qualifier. Later that day, a chain-strap clutch is delivered to my door. Slowly, a collection assembles.
“I’m not going out with you while you’re wearing that,” my wife says the next day, pointing to the shearling bag over my shoulder.
“Really? Which one should I wear?” I say, indicating the array of statement bags lined up on the sofa.
When it becomes apparent that I will be going to the shops by myself, I select the brown Asos weave tote – to my bag-blind eyes, a dead ringer for Bottega Veneta’s signature intrecciato bags, as sported by such luminaries as the actor Joe Alwyn. I like it because it is stylish yet capacious enough to hold a litre of milk and a box of cat food.
But, on the way to the shops, I realise I am having trouble making the look my own. The extent of the discomfort I feel carrying a women’s tote catches me by surprise: it triggers memories of my mother making me hold her bag while she tried something on in the aisle of a dress shop. It is a memory of undiluted mortification. I am doing now what I did then – holding the bag slightly out in front of me, as if it contains something I am allergic to.
Fortunately, it is 2025 and I live in London, so there is nothing to be embarrassed about; no one cares what you are putting your shopping in at the self-checkout. In any case, the very idea of a gender-specific bag now seems obsolete. The kind of style this chocolate-brown tote represents is timeless – if it is good enough for Alwyn, it is good enough for me.
When the rain intensifies on the way home, I briefly break into a run, before thinking: stop, or people will think you have just stolen this bag.
The next day, I find myself in my local shopping precinct wearing a passable stand-in for Bottega Veneta’s Cassette bag. The actor Jacob Elordi is sometimes seen wearing one of these, which he cites as a necessity. “When I leave home, I need to have a certain thing from every category with me in case I get bored,” he told GQ. “A book, a notepad, rolls of film, a camera, a pen.” Mine contains the scrunched-up paper stuffing it came with.
This is a big problem: I don’t really have anything to put in a bag like this. I can accommodate a pen, a notepad and a camera (my phone) in my pockets. I have a work bag – a canvas rucksack – for when I need to carry a laptop, various chargers, a spare pair of socks and possibly a bottle of train-station wine. But I have no use for a bag the size of a single paperback.
Also, it would be fair to say I am not really carrying it off. To stroll around with a padded clutch over one shoulder requires something I possess very little of – let’s call it insouciance. I don’t think I look very insouciant; I think I look as if I am carrying essential medication.
I am even more uncomfortable going out and about with a classic Gucci Jackie bag. This is not because it is too feminine – the Jackie featured heavily on the catwalk in the autumn/winter menswear shows – but because its retail price lies somewhere north of £3,000. Even if I stuffed it with my laptop, my phone, my glasses and the cash equivalent of my overdraft facility, the bag would still be worth more than the contents.
Down at the western extremity of the local market, wearing my shearling bag from M&S, I attract a number of sidelong glances. These are hard to interpret – one of the rules of sidelong glances is that you shouldn’t return them – but I don’t think the bag has much to do with it. It’s probably because I don’t often lurk suspiciously at this end of the market, while a lot of other people transparently do. It could also have something to do with the photographer who is ordering me to stand among the ladies’ dresses for sale, because she likes the way they billow in the near gale-force winds.
Under the circumstances, my reasonably priced, faux-fleece cross-body bag provides a certain strange comfort. With it tucked securely against my frame, I am reassured knowing it contains my glasses case, my keys and a couple of potatoes for later.
