Juicy Couture Gossip Hobo

Juicy Couture Gossip Hobo

I’ll go ahead and say this now: I’m not great fan of Juicy Couture. I don’t like wearing sweats out of the house, making their signature track suits well nigh useless in my wardrobe, and I’m definitely not a fan of the (mercifully dying) trend of wearing messages across one’s bum, a communication tool that their creators pioneered.

It seems, though, that with changing tastes and changing markets, Juicy Couture has started to get their grown-up act together a bit. I noticed some absolutely covetable coats in last year’s fall/winter collection, and I think their line of jewelry charms is darling. I admit all this begrudgingly: their heretofore unimpressive line of sweatpants and message tees makes me really want to continue to snark about them, but I’m now willing to admit that I may have to reevaluate my opinions.

I have a hard time respecting a brand that slacks in the handbag department, though, and up until fairly recently, Juicy’s handbag line was more or less a bunch of elaborately embroidered towel-bags. Since absorbency is not in my set of bag criteria, I always walked straight past them in department stores, en route to things made of more appropriate materials.

Yesterday, however, Juicy Couture managed to prove me (at least momentarily) wrong. I was with my mom, perusing the handbags at Bloomingdale’s in Atlanta, and a black hobo caught my eye. Normally, black bags don’t do it for me, but this had a great shape and the leather looked really soft, so I bit. As I walked up to it, I noticed where I was – the Juicy Couture section. I almost abandoned ship right there, but I figured there was no harm in looking, right?

Lo and behold, I found myself holding the Juicy Couture Leather Lock Gossip Hobo in black. I can’t find any information on what type of leather the bag is composed of, but based on how incredibly soft and unstructured it was, I’m guessing lamb. And there are very few things in life that I love more than a bag made out of lamb leather (sorry, lambs).

I started yanking the stuffing out of it like a mad woman in order to try it on, drawing some odd looks from nearby salespeople (I told them why I was doing it, and it turns out they’re fans of the blog!), and I liked the bag even better once it wasn’t full of tissue paper. The official photography is misleading, as it is with a lot of super-soft bags – in real life, the hobo part is taller, the arm opening smaller, and the shape altogether more reminiscent of the Gucci Horsebit Hobo, except much less expensive and much more comfortable on the shoulder.

The diagonal strips of leather give the otherwise-neutral bag a bit of visual interest, and the way the strap is attached is beautiful in person and shows tremendous creativity and attention to detail – they certainly didn’t have to make the bag this special, or out of this type of wonderful leather, to justify their very reasonable price tag of $450 via eLuxury.

So I’m going to be paying closer attention to Juicy in the future – as long as they continue their new tradition of not writing ‘Juicy’ all over everything they manufacture.