At last! Fashion is making bags for women who work, not just ladies who lunch | Jessica Cartner-Morley on fashion
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My work bag is closer in scale to a laundry basket than the tiny handbags clutched by models. The Guardian’s journalism is independent. We will earn a commission if you buy something through an affiliate link. Learn more. Fashion sometimes excludes people on grounds that are truly nasty and toxic and which reflect and drive fundamental problems in our culture: race, weight, wealth. So I hesitate to bring up what I’m about to say because it is small-fry compared with those issues. What I want to talk about today is not, in the scheme of things, any kind of hard luck story. But I am going to bring it up anyway.
![[Jess Cartner-Morley]](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/uploads/2019/05/20/Jess_Cartner-Morley,_L.png?width=75&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none)
The microaggression for which I would like to call out fashion, today, is for all the times it has made me feel excluded because my handbag is inelegantly big and heavy. I have quite often felt like a no-hope outcast from glamour, on the grounds that the outfits fashion celebrates on catwalks or billboards or red carpets feature a handbag no bigger than a hardback novel, while the bag I carry to the office and back every day is closer in scale to a laundry basket.
The disconnect between the bags most of us carry and the bags that are held up as aspirational is almost total. Are handbag designers unaware of the invention of the laptop? Do they know a special shop that sells umbrellas the size of fountain pens? And that’s before we’ve addressed the almost total lack of representation, on any of fashion’s platforms, of the “overspill bag”.
Those generic cotton tote bags, for carrying the returns parcel you need to drop off and the dishwasher tablets you need to buy, your extra cardigan or gym trainers, are an unavoidable part of modern life. They are everywhere: bundled under desks, hanging off buggy straps, wedged lumpily between knees at the bus stop. But woefully underrepresented in fashion.
