There have been fuzzy gremlins at Gucci, toads at Tory Burch and crisp packets at the always quirky Anya Hindmarch. The surrealist designer Elsa Schiaparelli herself would surely have given her blessing to the maison’s current creative director Daniel Roseberry for his smart boxy top-handle bags with golden body part protrusions. After all, Schiaparelli loved her “little jokes”, and it seems this season, so do we all.
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It’s not the first time novelty bags have had a moment. Judith Leiber with her sparkling and delightfully silly clutches, and Jeremy Scott’s campy bags that have included everything from baby bottles to alarm clocks, are incredibly fun proof of this.
It’s not all OTT gags either. If you prefer a more low-key novelty bag you could opt for one of Simone Rocha’s pearl minaudières or Alaïa’s Le Coeur bag, the sweet heart-shaped bag spied all over Instagram.
However, the screwball bag comes at an interesting moment in fashion. The recent season mostly focused on “wearable” clothing with pared-back separates, tailoring, elegance and roomy, practical bags. It’s a shift that has been attributed to the looming recession, the sense that after the “Roaring 20s” and “dopamine dressing” of a post-lockdown world, we’re getting back down to business and a desire for practical clothes to cherish forever. As a counter to the novelty bag, the “anti-It bag” – logo-free and well-made in quality leather from the likes of The Row, Toteme, Savette and Neous – has also been resonating.Celenie Seidel, Farfetch senior womenswear lead, believes both the novelty bag and the anti-It bag have their place in a topsy-turvy world.
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“The two opposing trends are super interesting in their contrast to each other, yet more than likely have similar origins – both a reaction to extended times of uncertainty,” she says. “The anti It-bag speaks to a mood for quiet consumption, investing in luxury and longevity, valuing craftsmanship and timelessness. On the contrary, but influenced by the same global state, the plethora of novelty bags we’ve been seeing nod to a need for escapism and ‘unreality’. Their tongue-in-cheek-ness is a tool to distract and to amuse.”
To return to Elsa Schiaparelli, she famously said that in difficult times fashion is always outrageous. Sometimes you simply want to carry a silly bag because it makes you laugh. Anyway, there’s no reason why you can’t treasure an oddball bag just as much as a classic Chanel flap bag for decades to come – joy is timeless after all.
