Let’s get one thing out there, straight away: I’m not a “pink” person. My favorite color was black when I was little, and I’ve added red and chartreuse to the list of favorites as I’ve gotten older, but pink has never been in the cards for me. I know that’s strange for a little girl that was raised in a bucolic suburb and with a very normal upbringing, but pink has always seemed to stand for everything that I’ve never been interested in: damsels in distress, princesses, and old-fashioned femininity. Not my thing. I’ll wear black until they find something darker.
Gradually, however, a certain shade of pink has begun to worm its way into my little black heart, and it’s the shade of pink used on the Rebecca Minkoff Embrace Perforated Hobo. I just wish that I liked the rest of the bag as much.
The finishing of this bag is problematic, to say the least. We’ll deal with the proliferation of perforated leather in a moment, but the biggest problem I’m having is with the leather. The quasi-glazed treatment that Minkoff chose is making this bag look like PVC – plastic, fake, shiny. Needless to say, not a good look. If the leather’s finish had been softer and more supple, I might not have been displeased with the perforation. Designers should remember that there’s a fine line between “perforated high-end handbag” and “basketball jersey,” and making a bag with this kind of glaze does not bode well for staying on the right side of that line.
The good news is that finishes like the one on this bag usually break in over time and become less fake-lookng; the bad news is that you still have to wear the bag until it looks like real leather again. For a shade of pink so perfect, however, it might be worth the time investment. Hopefully we’ll see this same color in non-perforated iterations throughout Minkoff’s spring collection. Buy through Bloomingdale’s for $425.
