Somewhere between the Jacquemus Le Chiquito having a moment and every subsequent designer racing to make an even smaller micro-bag, the fashion industry made a decision on our behalf: a woman’s purse is no longer required to be useful.
Season after season, designer bags have all become varying degrees of tiny.
In fact, we’ve reached a point where most of our bags can’t even fit an iPhone horizontally. You either carry it in your hand all night, or ask the nearest man to put it in his, much larger, pockets. A bag, today, is just jewelry with a strap.
The problem with this is most adult women can’t actually navigate a full 24 hours with nothing on their person but a credit card and a lip balm. We all tried that in 2019 already, and it wasn’t a success.
THE SECRET BAG
Of course, bags have always had a decorative function alongside a practical one, they’ve always been at most half-decorative. But nowadays they’re inching closer to fully decorative and entirely useless. Which created the need for: the car bag. The less glamorous twin that makes fewer public appearances.
Every woman I know has one. A tote, usually, shapeless, slightly guilty-looking, containing the actual essentials of the day: chargers, meds, a makeup bag, a spare sweater, snacks, a hairbrush.
It lives in the backseat or the trunk. You don’t carry the car bag into the restaurant. You visit it, discreetly, between destinations.
It’s become so universal that the runways have started co-opting it. Fashion houses are now styling models carrying two bags at once, clutching a micro-purse in one hand while lugging a giant, overstuffed tote in the other. It’s art imitating life.
THE PERFORMANCE OF A TINY BAG
It’s sorta hilarious and also, if you sit with it a beat too long, a little pointed. Because the thing about the tiny bag is that it doesn’t just ask you to carry less, it expects you to need less, or at least to be seen needing less.
No emergencies, no logistics, no fifty-pound bill of contingency planning. It’s a display of effortlessness sold to women who are, statistically, doing most of the actual heavy lifting out of frame. In a way, it’s performative.
We still have keys, cards, phones that die at 4 p.m., and the chaos of a normal work day. That chaos didn’t shrink. Our needs didn’t cease to exist. Our belongings weren’t turned obsolete. They just moved to the car. We banished them out of the public eye.
THE DOUBLE BAG REALITY
Honestly, we’re probably not giving up the tiny bag any time soon. It photographs beautifully and asks nothing of us. We’ve already collectively agreed to play along. But we’d like it on the record that somewhere in a garage right now, there’s a second bag doing all the actual work, and it’s the real MVP of modern womanhood, even if it never sees the light of day.
