For Its Next Trick, Balenciaga Has Made an IKEA Shopping Bag, but Fashion

Folks, I don’t know how to explain this any better than the photo above already does. Most of you are probably familiar with IKEA’s big, blue shopping bags, which are awkwardly constructed in the exact proportion that would be necessary to carry a brand new set of modular Swedish golf clubs, which is the only thing IKEA doesn’t make. I see these bags practically every day, because they’re what the manchildren who populate my trendy Brooklyn neighborhood use to carry their belonging to the wash-n-fold, even though real IKEA bags are fully open at the top and not at all suited to keeping your dirty undies secure for a few blocks. Literally just buy a laundry bag, guys, they’re $6 on Amazon!!

Anyway.

Balenciaga creative director Demna Gvasalia is a big fan of taking the concepts of street fashion to their logical extremes, and in that sense, I guess we should have seen this extremely literal take on every college student’s favorite moving supply coming. After all, Gvasalia peppered his first-ever Balenciaga women’s runway with luxe leather versions of the coated textile totes that New Yorkers probably recognize best as the bags indigent people in the city often use to move around their worldly possessions, so there was really no other way this whole thing could go. In Hindsight, I Suppose We’ve Been Barreling Toward This Weird Conclusion For Quite A While is, after all, the theme of the past several years at least, both in fashion and in culture at large.

So now we’re at this delicate point in time, in which it’s hard to separate parody from reality on any plane of existence, and you can either go to IKEA, get some meatballs and pay a buck for a bag, or you can buy the leather version from a luxury retailer (MR PORTER, specifically) for $2,145. Oh, and the leather version is exactly the same shade of blue as the original, lest you attempt to explain away the similarities of the two as simply a coincidence of functionality. Gvasalia is practically daring you to try. There’s one important difference, though: this version zips, so at least your boxers won’t sail away down the block. That would be embarrassing.