It’s not a multi-thousand pound handbag from Hermès that best captures the new era of It bags, but a £149 tote from John Lewis.
Launched this season, it’s deeper (45cm) and taller (33cm) than your average handbag, and comes loaded with good intentions. It’s able to hold your packed lunch, flask and book, as well – at a push – as your gym kit. The high street retailer is calling it the Intentional tote bag.
According to Carrie Cooper, John Lewis’s senior footwear and accessories designer, it’s “an all-day bag – you can fit your spare shoes, snacks and water bottle in but, rather than a more practical and functional tote, this feels more ‘intentional’ and a decision rather than a basic shopper”. It is, she says, “oversized but not structured”.
These “good intention” bags, often deeper and less wide than totes of yore, focus on what they can hold rather than the space they take up. They are everywhere. Marks & Spencer has a suede equivalent and one that comes with ruching and a drawstring. Jigsaw calls its iteration a “shopper”. Me+Em, the brand favoured by the working women of the Labour party, has a 36.5cm-long “soft day bag”.
The California climbing brand Gramicci offers a gorpcore version: a 40-litre ripstop tote that would happily hold your mason jar of overnight oats as well as a packable mac. The LA-based, Roman Coppola–founded Pacific Tote Company makes cult sturdy canvas versions beloved of big names such as Anthony Hopkins and Alexa Chung. According to co-founder and creative architect Duffy Culligan, they don’t think of them as “shopping bags” – “they’re more like the co-conspirator of an unplanned adventure”.
The good intentions bag is an antidote to the need to carry two receptacles – a handbag for show and a tote for the actual stuff you need. And they might just be the final nail in the coffin for the flimsy totes cluttering up hallways up and down the country. Once hailed as a sustainable alternative to the plastic bag, the average cotton tote, according to the UN environment programme, needs to be used between 50 and 150 times to offset its production, yet in reality less than 10% of totes are used more than three times.
“I think there’s a real ‘tote fatigue’ happening right now,” says Culligan. “Everyone’s cities are flooded with flimsy promotional bags – there’s a certain irony to carrying a repurposed grocery tote, but most of those are churned out cheaply in mass factories, and they fall apart in a month.”
More often than not conspicuously branded, trumpeting Daunt Books, the New Yorker, or Paris’s Shakespeare and Company, these totes were once understood in the mainstream to semi-innocently signal a cultured outlook. But now, read more performative than quietly impressive.
Even the tote 2.0, reinforced, more genuinely reusable and best summed up by the perplexing Trader Joe’s phenomenon – the US grocer’s totes go for about $2.99 at home but thousands on resale sites globally – is arguably on its way out.
According to Bridget Dalton, a semiotician and cultural analyst at Truth Consulting, the old fabric totes had obvious practical limitations. They “may indicate your cultural allegiance, but they slip off your shoulder and they’re basically quite rubbish,” she says. By contrast, good intention bags indicate a “dedication to practicality”.
Bags have always been loaded with ideas of gender, class and power, and the bags winning in this new accessories dawn are no different.
“Big bags are more gender-neutral,” says Dalton, referencing David Beckham and the enormous Hermès bag he was spotted toting in Paris last week. They are, she says, “a sartorial stride towards equality; men and women carry[ing] the same stuff”.
In terms of status, Dalton references the “ludicrously capacious” bag insult from Succession. “Even a few years ago, a capacious bag is a signifier of being déclassé, lower-class. It’s an embarrassment.”
This, she says, is crucial to this notion of good intentions. “Carrying a lot of stuff around is a historically working-class requirement. So, therefore, you have the idea of a good intention as a peasant morality, which is about self-sustaining, self-reliance, but also a rejection of the frivolous.” It’s the opposite of the late 2010s trend for the intrinsically impractical tiny handbag, barely big enough for a thimble let alone a flask.
Unlike the small or non-existent bags of the chauffeured, often failing-upwards characters of Succession, the good intentions bag is, according to Dalton, “a statement that says my identity is not contingent upon other people doing stuff for me. I can be luxe, practical and unpretentious at the same time.”
