Totes amazing and totes emosh, the whole tote bag phenomenon, isn’t it? Look around and you see them everywhere. Utilitarian. Ubiquitous. Classless. Playful and practical. Of minimal monetary value, yes, but their printed graphics or embroidered details telegraph crucial points of difference for each carrier.
A silly-money Louis Vuitton holdall, a shopper from Goyard or even a butch utility commuter bag by Filson might mark you out as a man of style, wealth and discrimination but in terms of prestige and credibility, the innate intellectual property and emotional baggage of the tote trumps them all.
Swing a canvas tote bearing a clever/aspirational/literary livery — The New Yorker, Daunt Books, Aman Beijing etc — on the morning commute or during a Saturday farmers’ market run and subtly, snootily, it tells your story: I attended this. I stayed there. I shop here. These are the people I know. I read, a lot. This is who I am … and, yes, shallow, untravelled and unthinking plastic bag person, it is a little bit better than what you are.
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In the 2020s the branded tote bag is, to the contemporary, luxury-lifestyle completist, what the tour T-shirt was to the 1990s rock’n’roll fan: a stealthy signifier of discernment, intellect, worldliness, taste and belonging. A nod to environmental responsibilities and a handheld indication of cultural and aesthetic discrimination. The simple cotton bag as a universal humble brag. Been there, done that, got the tote.
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How much do they cost? Zero. Nada. One must never buy a tote — it has to be gifted or (legally) removed from a hotel room cupboard. Supplied as part of a cult magazine subscription deal or given away at a literary festival or tech conference, or on exiting a groovy party at Salone del Mobile in Milan.
The more obscure the tote’s livery, the more incongruous and remote it is from its complimentary origin, the better its streetwalking cred. Ergo, the New Yorker tote in London, the Daunt Books one in Manhattan. By all means get your bag for life from the supermarket. But your bag for lifestyle must come from the Hay Festival.
How did we go so totestally tonto about totes? The carry-on fashion really took off about 20 years ago, but the modern bag design itself — a rudimentary square of stitched cotton with two cloth handles added — had already enjoyed continuous use as a pre-plastic shopper in India and Africa for generations.
In 1944 the American outdoor brand LL Bean created a large and boxy canvas bag intended for transporting ice from car to freezer. Combining strength and versatility, the bag — in effect the first modern, western tote — was instantly popular, with customers co-opting it to hold tools, groceries and laundry. Soon the preppy outfitter was adorning its totes with customers’ initials. (The yachty, snooty preppies love an initial.)
But it was the literary community that proved to be the tote’s most influential style mavens. The Strand tote, first introduced in 1980, boldly advertised the storied New York bookstore’s name and its famous slogan “18 miles of books” and sold by the bagful.
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The bookshop now offers more than 100 different designs of the world-famous tote. Hundreds of bookshops in the US and Europe (Daunt Books etc) copied the idea, with thousands of hotels, business conferences, organic food shops and fashion houses following suit.
Before long, uptight American men’s media decided on making the tote a gender-political thing, suggesting that the tote harboured “feminine connotations”. This prompted very concerned young males in the US to ask the internet quasi-existential questions such as “will I look gay if I carry a tote bag?” (Not really sure why or how this happened. Perhaps the light and flimsy nature of the tote and its unisex appeal and the way it is worn casually slung across a shoulder makes it seem less macho than a big butch rucksack or chunky, messenger crossbody?) Still, the tote’s supposed “gayness” only added to the appeal and popularity.
Britain’s male toters also have to respectfully nod to the maverick carrier bag habits of Mr Peter York, who for decades set the trend for egalitarian tonnage by teaming his Savile Row whistles with shopping bags from Tesco or Sainsbury’s.
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The carriers held Peter’s documents and diary and mini brolly, and were taken to high-powered meetings and pitches as a sort of anti-luxe statement — the marketing guru, writer and co-founder of the Sloane Ranger books phenomenon was well aware that their poly presence was slightly confusing and aesthetically jarring for big, swinging dick City clients, auto brand denizens and his broad social circle.
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Why didn’t a successful, well-dressed man like him prefer something from Dunhill, LV, Tanner Krolle or Bill Amberg, they would wonder? Of course, York knew very well that he was delivering a stylistic (and reverse snobby) curveball and refused to tote anything else with his smart suits and Brooks Brothers shirts.
Now, as supermarkets around the world strive to phase out single-use plastic bags, the tote’s cotton has become polythene’s obvious replacement. The problem in the retail space being, of course, that a cotton/canvas tote bag must be used an estimated 300 times before it can offset its carbon footprint.
Yet the tote’s marriage of convenience, simplicity and no-fuss elegance continues to make it an effective portable billboard, its deployment as both a promotional tool and practical personal style statement rendering it almost as ubiquitous as the plastic shopper it appears to have replaced. The average male urbanite has at least a dozen of them in his possession. All stuffed into another tote bag.
Bagsie this one?
• Chanel x Cliveden Literary Festival
• Tote from the Aman Hotel, New York
• Rolex Arts Festival
• Black Cow Vodka
• Adam Nathaniel Furman for Pullman Hotels
• Design totes: Tom Dixon and Wallpaper* magazine
Simon Mills writes the newsletter Male on Sunday
