Pop Shots It's All In The Bag

Man purse or otherwise, a man’s gotta have a nice bag.

- Palash Krishna Mehrotra

I ’ve always been a carrier of bags. I continued carrying and collecting small bags unselfconsciously until, at some point in the history of the West, they started to call them man purses. American men’s magazines nowadays ponder this with great seriousness. GQ declared in January that ‘The Man Purse Has Arrived.’

The man purse takes many forms: ‘camera bags’, ‘small cross body bags’, ‘flight bags’ and ‘small messengers’. Robert Lanham’s cult classic The Hipster Handbook includes it as part of the definition of hipster: ‘You carry a shoulder strap messenger bag’. I’ve bought bags because I’ve liked the kinkiness of shape, often without knowing what the bag is meant for. In college, an exchange student from Berkeley excitedly pointed at my really tiny rucksack and said ‘Wow, that’s a raver’s bag!’ I hadn’t a clue.

Of course, I was quite relieved when the exchange student identified my raver’s bag as such, for, before that, my classmates had dubbed it a ‘girlie’ bag. As it turned out, I consoled myself, it was a cultural misunderstanding.