Bags Were Always Meant to Look a Little Chaotic

I’ve never identified as a messy person. Instead, I’d like to think of myself as someone who has a lot of stuff but very little time. That means I have to live with my stuff. I have to lug my stuff. I have to apologize for my stuff. On any given day, if you see me, it’s likely that stuff is poking out of the pockets of my sweater and skirts, dangling from my bags, and cradled in my arms. It’s as much a part of me as anything I wear, and yet it has always made me feel bad. The stuff feels shameful.

And then there was Mrs. Prada. At the Spring/Summer 2024 Miu Miu show in Paris last September, I saw her models walk down the runway carrying large, overstuffed Miu Miu bags. Lanyards, unstrapped shoes, and extra pairs of bright orange swimming briefs spilled over the unzipped sides. It felt like an invitation to stop hiding the evidence of our bustling lives.

At Miu Miu’s Spring 2024 show, Mrs. Prada found beauty in an overstuffed bag.

Stuffed bags, at the time of the show, had already been circulating heavily on social media, a result of Gen Z discovering the late Jane Birkin’s own infamous bag covered in trinkets and tchotchkes. A photo of her grasping it while grinning ear to ear quickly became a personal style talisman, and videos of girls adorning their vintage Balenciaga City bags with fluffy animal keychains and colorful beaded necklaces took over TikTok and Instagram. And then the look was all over the runway, too.

For Spring 2024, Balenciaga showed bags covered in a handful of keychains. On TikTok, fashion fans often accessorize vintage Balenciaga City bags in similar ways that reflect their personalities.

In recent seasons, a major bag trend has emerged, and it isn’t a shape or color or even style, but rather the distinctive look of being alive.

At Coach, models wore one large bag and one small bag simultaneously, NYC-themed souvenir keychains and “I ❤️ New York” mugs dangling from the intertwined straps. At Adrian Appiolaza’s Moschino debut, baguettes and vegetables peeked out from clutches made to look like standard grocery bags. At Tory Burch, models have consistently been carrying unzipped bags with flaps swung open with reckless abandon. In recent seasons, a major bag trend has emerged, and it isn’t a shape or color or even style, but rather the distinctive look of being alive. Bags brimming with personality and bags overflowing with life are what’s in. Bags that appear like they are actually being used is what everyone is after. Bags that … look like bags!

At Coach, bags were styled in a way that literally and metaphorically reflected the chaos of New York City, with souvenir keychains, Yankees caps, and postcards. In typical New York fashion, multiple bags were worn at once.

As a perfectionist, I’ve struggled with this idea. A bag, by definition and according to Google, is “a container made of flexible material with an opening at the top, used for carrying things.” And yet I have always treated bags more like a cherry on top of an outfit and less like a vessel for transferring items from my house to my life.

If anything, bags have more often been a vessel for my own insecurities. When I was 13, I thought having a velour Juicy Couture bag would determine the trajectory of my existence. The idea of not owning a bag covered in Burberry check made me, at one point, feel as though I might die. I didn’t want these bags because I needed them to live my life—I wanted them to prove I had a life worth living.

In February 2023, Tory Burch showed bags with flaps open and off-kilter logos. In the show notes, Burch wrote that she wanted to break down the traditional wardrobe and rebuild it with an “undone attitude.”

Even now, I can still feel those pings of desire eating away at me when I see a bag I really want for the first time. And there are still bags I own—like my baby-blue Chanel 22 or my Miu Miu Arcadie bag or my hot red oversize Gucci horsebit bag—that are so incredible, I feel invincible when I wear them. People chase me down the street to compliment them, and I say “Thank you” like I’m a proud parent.

But for the most part, on any given day, I’m apologizing for my bags, because they aren’t zipped neatly, or because they are flanked by two large canvas totes filled with gym clothes. I’m whispering “I’m sorry” to friends as I slide into a dinner booth while trying to stuff my bag, holding my work laptop, underneath. For so long, I’ve seen bags as a status symbol that I forgot they’re really meant for living, not representing some unrealistic ideal of buttoned-up normalcy I’ll likely never achieve. Even the effortlessly fabulous Jane Birkin knew that.

The patron saint of chaotic big bags, Jane Birkin, in 1990 with French director Bertrand Tavernier, holding her iconic Birkin bag the same way models would hold theirs at Miu Miu’s Spring 2024 show last fall

But only after I’d seen Mrs. Prada do it did I consider that maybe I should lean into the look, instead of trying to run from it.

At New York Fashion Week this February, a street-style photo surfaced of me standing with a friend, a single wired Apple earbud dangling from my Miu Miu bag. When I saw the picture, my eyes were instantly drawn to the one thing that made it imperfect.

If it had been planned, that lone earphone is the type of thing the photographer would have asked me to fix before gently tucking a few unruly strands of hair behind my ears. But I actually found it quite charming. What I loved the most about it was how if you look at the photo, that one detail reveals the movement of the moments leading up to it: You see me smiling next to my friend—but you also see me running down the block listening to a song, before yanking open the zipper of my bag to stuff the headphones inside, in an attempt to appear more put-together for the mobs of photographers outside a fashion show. When I reposted the picture, almost every single compliment I received was about that earbud, with friends exclaiming that it made the look, gave it personality. One even said she saw herself in the little headphone, dangling for its life amongst the chaos. “That’s me,” she said. I saw myself in it too.

And it was the tip of the iceberg.

At London Fashion Week right after, I decided to go all in on this look. I already had to stuff my bags with things for back-to-back appointments, shows, and dinners. I figured: Why not just own it?

The upside to an over-accessorized bag is always having a fun lap to look at while stuck in traffic.

First, I decided to take what I’ll call the personality approach. I adorned my black Miu Miu Arcadie bag with a cute fuzzy pink rabbit keychain, and then tied a large pastel pink bow onto the handle. These are two items that I feel encapsulate my entire being. If you look inside my brain, I think you’d find similar objects adorning my cranial nerves. And so, for the first time I allowed myself to be defined not just by the golden Miu Miu logo I wear like my religious abuela dons her cross, but also by my own quirks. And lots of people took note—I didn’t speak to a single soul that day who didn’t have something to say about it. One editor I met for the first time even said, “I don’t know you, and yet I know exactly who you are because of the way you’re wearing that bag.”

My favorite Miu Miu Arcadie bag adorned with pink accessories

As the week progressed, my sanity worsened. The hours I was able to actually sleep dwindled. But instead of trying to compensate, I threw on my red Gucci horsebit bag. I didn’t shut the flap, because I actually couldn’t be bothered, and I didn’t allow myself to feel bad about it either. While my headphones weren’t dangling from it, you could still see them peeking out from the top, along with a handful of receipts and a fashion show invite. Worn this way, the bag revealed not so much my personality but my entire life at the moment. It also made me look like I was confident enough to look a little messy and not care, and that level of nonchalance is something I strive for. I felt so indomitable, it didn’t even occur to me to worry over something falling out.

Some might say my dress looks wrinkled, but to them I’d reply: What are wrinkles if not another imperfect accessory to complement my freaky unzipped Gucci bag?

Finally, I decided to dabble in true chaos. For work, I always use a vintage cracked-leather studded Miu Miu bag because it can fit everything and then a laptop. So for the final day of London Fashion Week, I thought: Why not push this bag to its limits? Why not really put it to work and pack a couple large bags of Marks & Spencer Percy Pig gummies, my green hotel robe, plus my wallet, room key, notebook, lip gloss, more spare makeup, a protein bar, and a random sprinkling of pamphlets, loose pieces of paper, coat check tags, and hair ties I’d accumulated over the week? It is the look that got me the closest to what God (Mrs. Prada) intended.

And what is a vintage Miu Miu bag intended for, if not as a vessel for everything from my hotel room?

It was definitely heavy, and not at all effortless. In fact, it required a lot of effort to lug. But for the first time in a long time, I carried it around without feeling as though I had to apologize. And I found people really gravitated toward me when I let my bags reflect the chaos of my life.

When I was walking out of my hotel, One Hundred Shoreditch, the kind of place that happens to reflect the creative neighborhood it’s located in, a guest whose looks I had been admiring every day in the elevator pointed at my stuffed Miu Miu and nodded: “So cool.” And for the first time ever, I didn’t apologize or try to overexplain or insinuate it looked better without loose candy bags and fabric spilling over the sides. Instead, I just nodded back. “I know, right?”