If you love accessories and fashion but don’t love buying or wearing animal products, you have my sympathies. Several of you have asked me to do a leather-free bag roundup over the past couple of months, and when I set out to do just that, the irritation and frustration of trying to find a designer bag that fits that description became clear.
Most online retailers won’t let you filter their products by material, and most in-site search functions don’t crawl the fabrication information to return results; that means that searching for “faux leather” or “PVC” is only helpful if the retailer’s copy team has included those keywords in the product’s name or general description, which isn’t always (or even usually) the case. Also, totes from designer brands that are made of primarily non-leather materials often have little bits of leather trim, and how retailers notate that fact varies widely and can be difficult to figure out for sure.
That being said, I feel as though my search was reasonably successful; ultimately, it yielded nearly two dozen bags from big-name designers like Givenchy and Bottega Veneta, as well as more affordable options from all-vegan lines like Deux Lux and Street Level. There’s even a faux leather Antigona, in case you’re looking for an ethical It Bag. Check out our finds below.