I’m in mourning for my bag like Masha in Chekhov’s The Seagull was in mourning for her life.

For Masha, in this 1895 play, marriage was the big disappointment, the thing she thought would complete her existence, launch her on a path to, well, whatever comes after absolute fulfillment. For me, it was a bag. When, after a lifetime of unstable freelance income, I was awarded two years’ research salary, I bought a Lemaire Croissant bag, in charcoal waxed linen, on sale.

I bought it because I saw a woman wearing one in Paris. Of course, it was Paris. And, of course you say “wearing” for a bag, as though it were not a utilitarian item but a decoration. The awkwardly shaped croissant is pure, sensual decoration: its shiny surface, its crumplable texture, its soft molding to the body, as though it were another body. I saw the woman with all the power that a glimpse – rather than proper scrutiny – has over us. The glimpse is the paradigm encounter of modernism, and this is something Lemaire leans into, creating catwalk cityscapes in abandoned urban buildings. The label’s Spring/Summer 23 show was held in what Lemaire described as “what seems to be [in] a train station hall, or a movie set,” where models cross each other’s paths “in a situational loop,” sometimes breaking into a run as though rushing for a missed connection.

Lemaire SS23

The woman I saw was walking through the Marais, a quartier that, across the three months I lived there, I’d grown to loathe for its transition from a Lemaire-appropriate post-industrial urban space into relentless Emily in Paris Paris. She was wearing a dark trench coat, the toning bag in contrasting texture, slung across her chest. She was tall, her long dark hair streamed behind her, adding an extra texture, as did her dark glasses. She was Baudelaire’s Parisienne: “Longue, mince, en grand deuil, douleur majestueuse,”(“À une passante,” Le Fleurs du mal, 1857, English translation here). Though her “mourning” was no more than this season’s new black, which is… black (have you noticed the monochromaticity of the fall/winter ‘24 catwalks?). She was entirely unlike me.

I didn’t want to become the woman. But somehow I thought the bag could be me, without the whole look. Was this what Freud calls transference, where the patient sees the therapist “through a haze of associations,” to which the therapist attempts to provide “an alternative script”? No, it was more like its reverse. I didn’t project Freud’s family feeling onto my passante, but intuited that something of her could rub off on me, not her entirety but… well, I don’t know. Or je ne sais quoi, whose recursive not-knowing prompts the pursuit of a state that can never be described in words.

The transference was transient. I’d have been better off treating myself to an IRL croissant (which doesn’t have a dissimilar texture). I’d have got more euros per use out of a flaky pastry than a several-hundred-euro waxed bandage, even on discount.

But I got to thinking why I wanted the croissant, and also why I didn’t use it. And why the phrase “trophy bag” seems to have fallen out of favor. Or whether I’m just not noticing it anymore, because I’ve noticed I don’t want a trophy bag.

Loewe, bag charm

Miu Miu bag charms include a charm-sized Miu Miu bag

Balenciaga SS24

Dua Lipa spotted adorning a Hermès Birkin bag with an array of charms and scarves, 2024

Trophy bags increasingly resemble trophies: not only the shiniest leather and fittings but – perhaps in response to all that monochrome “quiet luxury” – a trend for bag charms, trophies on trophies, designer-produced individuality, Non-Fungible Tokens of achievement, good memories or luck. Or just themselves: Miu Miu bag charms even include a charm-sized Miu Miu bag.

A trophy is the notion of fashion as a treat, a reward. But for whom? Bags are a trophy for designers. More than use, the bag signals membership of the fashion club. Look at how, at every fashion show, celebs will turn up wearing one item from the collection. And more often than not, it’s the bag, because bags are easy to put on, take off, pass around. Bags fit everyone. You can wear them with cheap clothes and they still speak a universal language of luxe. Their transferability, combined with their much-vaunted sexual overtones (in Freudian terms, “the little bag [is] representative of the Venus shell, the female genitalia”), make bags particularly powerful coins in the oneiric currency of symbols.

For most people, buying a trophy bag is a dream. One person buysso that the bag appears in the dreams of millions, establishing the brand’s hold on fashion’s libidinal economy. Who doesn’t know what a Hermes Birkin is? But how many have seen one, touched one? The pull of trophy items is their inaccessibility, particularly powerful when their symbolic nature is backgrounded by their insistent materiality. This is a kind of “enshittification,” as described by Cory Doctorow in his 2023 book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation. Social media platforms randomly promote a number of (usually paying) users to ensure that others invest their desires in what they could have won. This practice may be comparatively recent in social media but it’s old-skool in fashion where it plays out materially: for every Chanel 2.55 there are a thousand tribute designs paying homage to the style, only boosting the original’s mythic status, and generating accompanying myths. There’s allegedly a waiting list of years for a Hermes Birkin and, Hermes is currently the subject of a lawsuit over alleged ways of shortcutting via demonstrable brand loyalty: buy heavily and you’ll move magically up the list.

Every single trophy item I’ve bought has been not only an illusion but possibly a delusion: the expensive leather jacket, the commemorative piece of jewelry, the fancy bag. My trophies have, at least, been what they’re increasingly sold as – an “investment.” But this is an idea that comes with its own discontents. When you invest in an item with a view to resale, your investment becomes less personal: the item will never “be you.” All bought on sale, I’ve resold them for something approaching the price I paid. All I had was a brief tenure on luxury, which was less expensive in terms of financial investment than in terms of investment of time, of imagination, and an investment of self. It was the self that didn’t stick. It is odd to discover that when I finally – if, temporarily – had the means, I turned away. The bag was beautiful but it was not for me. I am not the kind of person who can carry an expensive bag. My lifestyle is not a trophy-bag lifestyle, my friends are not trophy-bag friends: amongst them, my bag would have no currency. The vaunted material qualities of the trophy bag – its lickable, buttery leather; its horsey smell – are the very qualities that evaporate into currency. If currency, like language, is a shortcut to abstraction, then, in the currency of symbols, the trophy bag becomes pure value and, as such it loses its material grip: its je ne sais quoi signifying, literally, nothing.