As much as I love and adore the quirky retro-modern aesthetic that designer Consuelo Castiglioni has created at Marni, I don’t always love the prices the brand charges for simple, non-leather totes in graphic prints. I always have a hard time reconciling designer price tags on those types of bags, though – there’s no such think as luxury cotton canvas, no matter how much anyone will try and convince me otherwise.

Well, first of all, it seems only human to acknowledge that watching Real Housewives of Orange County last night, in light of the day’s tragic events in Boston, seemed even sillier than it usually does. Still, one of the great beauties of entertainment of all types, even trashy reality television, is its ability to provide a small bit of mental or emotional relief (maybe relief isn’t the word – maybe it’s more like distraction) when we need it this most.

If you played along yesterday with our Net-a-Porter x PurseBlog Ultimate Fashion Hunt riddle and came up with the Chloe Alison Cotton and Leather Shopper as your answer, then congrats! You might be the lucky lady (or gent, I suppose) who gets to call this bag your very own. The winner is being contacted and we’ll publicly reveal the winners of all three bags at the end of the contest, but first, we want to talk a little bit about why this is one of the bags that we chose to give away with our friends at Net-a-Porter.

It seems like we’ve been talking about black-and-white bags forever, but based on the current slate of neutral, bicolor bags that have now arrived in stores for spring, the trend has only just begun. We gave you a rundown of nine styles to get you started on the right path back in January, but now we’ve got another dozen that you should consider now that spring has arrived.

Sometimes, a bag just doesn’t make sense until you see it on someone. I’ve seen the Anya Hindmarch Bathurst Bag on plenty of retail websites, and I’ve always found it a bit confusing; Why the big strap? Why make the big strap a different color? It’s a nice bag, of course, but it didn’t quite click for me until I saw someone carrying the black version with its blue strap (it also comes with a tonal black strap) in front of me on Madison Avenue over the weekend.

Until I saw the Balenciaga Serpent Arena Classic Work Bag, it had never occurred to me that I hadn’t ever seen a snakeskin Bal Motorcycle bag. After all, the design has been around in one incarnation or another for over a decade, and we’ve seen it in everything from straw to crocodile – surely there had been at least a python version, right?

It’s that time of the season again! Although the Celine Fall 2013 lookbook isn’t readily available on the front page of Celine’s website, we did a little digging and found all the press images of the collection, including the wood-grain Phantom Luggage Tote and Classic Box Bag that the press was absolutely giddy over at the collection’s press preview several months ago.

I’m always on the lookout for men’s bags that are a little bit left-of-center, and with Master-Piece Co’s fun printed men’s backpacks, I believe I’ve found just that. These Master-Piece Co Printed Backpacks are like catnip for menswear bros – they’re brightly printed but with retro touches and leather trim that give them an air of some kind of amorphous authenticity, they’re all made in Japan (as I understand it, Japan is very important to menswear bros), and two of them are made in collaboration with other indie design brands.

If you know anything about bags (and you probably do, otherwise you’d be looking at cat pictures on BuzzFeed like literally everyone else on the Internet), you know that Hermes is the holy grail. Sure, a woman’s personal grail bag might not be Hermes, but when it comes to the hierarchy of luxury handbags, no one beats Hermes at its own game.

After a small hiatus for my spring vacation last week, we’re back today with your weekly dose of Friday bag deals from around the Internet. If you’re in New York, as I am, you may want to salve your frustration over the fact that it’s gotten cold all over again by buying a handbag, and if that’s the case, we always suggest that you do it while said bag is on sale, if possible.