What Makes a Good Bag?
I think this one from Louis Vuitton might be it.
I saw a glimpse of true wearability on the Louis Vuitton spring/summer 2025 runway via one of the bags, the Rider. (Full disclosure: I participated in a talk for Louis Vuitton this past week with Nicolas Ghesquière expert Eden Pritikin. If you follow this Substack, you’ll see I did a piece on why Eden let go of her Nicolas-era Balenciaga archive a few months back.) Note: Regardless of the Louis Vuitton project, this Substack piece is rogue and my own because I want to sing the praises of a stellar bag that can outlast a nuclear war.
The aforementioned Rider has a type of good quality ease that is made to last for eons. This is a shrunken duffel bag. The silhouette is like a slim bullet yet expandable. Stuffable yet structured. The sides of the bag have a concave curve like a woman’s whittled waist. The flailing sharp straps! The gleaming buckles! Utilitarian elegance with some titillating freak.
Interestingly enough, the Rider is derived from a motorcycle jacket. Sound familiar? Ghesquière, now the women’s artistic director of Louis Vuitton, was the creative director of Balenciaga between 1997-2013, and the brain behind that Balenciaga Le Dix Motorcycle Lariat bag, which was, yes, also inspired by a motorcycle jacket.
Ghesquière created what is now known as the City Bag in 2001 without a monogram. No logo. No nada. This was a bold move during a high-octane rise of labels, labels, labels. The piece was durable. The bag had heft. It was made to withstand the daily ailments commuting and yet look great brined with grit. Fun fact: The bag sat languishing on a shelf in Ghesquière’s studio until Kate Moss spotted it, nabbed it, and voila, it was everywhere. Fast forward a few years later, it came in every color of a searing rainbow or saccharine lollipop. Back then, you could shove your jumbo Evian in there, and now you can fit your laptop.
Today, the City Bag continues to rear its girthy leather genius on babes worldwide. The girls still love it, now dressing it up with fabulously fussy accouterments. The bag also received a second wind after the Demna-run House reissued it last season as “Le City”.
Over the past year, there have been peekaboos of how we should truly sweat in our clothes. Looks and shopping habits feel more tailored to reality than they did a few years ago. In my own life, there’s a reason why I highlighted former French Vogue editor-in-chief Emmanuelle Alt last week, who wears a steady rotation of easy trousers and vintage leather jackets. Or, why I gravitated towards Dalida, a veteran collection managing director, who I spotted backstage at Tory Burch. These women aren’t dressing for a photo, they are dressing for their lives. This is how our bags should be, too.
Each of my bags appear as if they’ve seen things. My bags are a sarcophagus of my life: my pains, my pleasures, and, indeed, my crumbs. I’ve earned my scuffs and my dismembered handles. If you swabbed any of my bags, I’m confident you’d find a strain of bubonic plague. This is because I grind my bags down. I exist through my bags.
Perhaps Louis Vuitton’s Rider echoes that same wearable sentiment as the rabdily beloved Balenciaga City bag. After all, Nicolas knows how to make a mean bag! This LV bag is crafted to haul stylishly. To schlep with ease, which sounds like an oxymoron, but when you have a great bag—the effect rings true. This is the sort of bag that grows with you and morphs with you, and ultimately, we should all have a sole day bag that this able to fulfill these demands. Maybe this bag is it.
Note, I have two thoughts: I’d love to eventually see the Rider in the Louis Vuitton monogram canvas and a sheeny Epi leather. These are classic nods to the House that show a fabulous dichotomy: brash va-va-voom and then sleek and classic. Tasty…
And below…where Eden and I ended up, and where we started! The Louis Vuitton Runway Reflections and our NEVERWORNS.
My main requirement for a bag is that it not weigh 5-10 pounds on its own. Why do brands do this?! By the time you’ve filled it with all your crap and walked around with it for a short while, you’ll have ruined your neck/shoulder/back. I can no longer suffer for fashion. 😑
I’ve been trying to resist the City Bag in part because I don’t want to give in to early 2000s nostalgia (I lived through that era as a late 20s grad student, haven’t I suffered enough??) so maybe I’ll shut it out completely by transferring my desire to the Rider.
(Someone please tell me to also ignore the resurgence of Pima Mostros and Speedcats, both of which I wore obsessively in the 90s/00s - I do not need more sneakers!)