There is, dear reader, a specific genre of person on the internet.
You may know this person, you may have even seen him out and about, most likely at one of those hip Brooklyn bodegas, sausaged into vintage selvedge denim, sporting a shiny, well-groomed mustache, fingers squeezed into thumb rings. “He is,” writes Tiffany Ng, “a film bro, with a preference, inevitably, for anything directed by Akira Kurosawa. He likely lives in an intentionally cluttered Greenpoint loft. The clutter includes first-edition copies of Dune.”
Even if you’ve never interacted with this particular genre of homo sapien, you’ve almost definitely interacted with memes about him. Instagrams like @throwingfits and @nolitadirtbag are teeming with the lot, which tend to run along the lines of: you’re in her DMs, I’m on page 47 of eBay at 2am looking for vintage Ann Demeulemeester. We are not the same.
On this occasion, as I regret to inform you, I’ve been this person myself.
But once upon a time, slogging through page forty-something of Vestiaire Collective in a fit of sleep-deprived delirium was less a sign that you need therapy, and more a badge of genuine commitment. Devotees would often be the first to show up, like clockwork every Saturday morning, at the sacred altars of the secondhand (i.e., estate sales and car-boots in shady parking lots), ready to rack up whatever rare Helmut Lang, Prada, or Dior was on offer.
Today, with thrifting going mainstream, this dying breed of resale obsessives has receded deeper and deeper into the annals of 1stdibs, burrowing past your average, overpriced rotation of Galliano-era Dior Gamblers and Saddle bags, into considerably more obscure territory. Names that lived and died, sometimes within the span of a single runway collection.
The Samourai. The Detective. The Trente.
And then, probably somewhere around page 47, the Dior Malice.
“My Christian Dior Purse!”
Here is a fact about the human condition: when the average person falls into a body of water, unexpectedly, fully clothed – and to make things all the more mortifying – in the middle of a date, the first coherent thought to surface (alongside, presumably, the person themselves) would likely concern their own bodily wellbeing: Am I dead? Can I still breathe? Is anyone watching?
At least, these are the standard-issue panic responses for someone who’s just been reminded, with some degree of urgency, that they are, in fact, mortal.
Carrie Bradshaw, however, is not your average mortal person.
The date, dear reader, is October 15, 2000. Season 3 of Sex and the City is well underway. And in true Darren Star-directorial fashion, this episode is titled Cock-a-Doodle-Do. Carrie is wearing a pink floral Richard Tyler dress, with a matching pink purse and rhinestone mules, on her way to reunite with the doodle-doo in question, Mr. Big, at – of all places – the Central Park Lake.
It’s a deeply dramatic venue for a reconciliation, even by Carrie’s standards. Though what makes it more dramatic for Carrie (and subsequently, traumatic for Sarah Jessica Parker, who had to get a tetanus shot) is that, while escaping Mr. Big’s big embrace, she loses her footing at the edge of the lake and trips backward into the water, dragging him face-first right along with her!
Falling in love has perhaps never been so literal.
Although it’s immediately clear where Carrie’s priorities are, as soon as she surfaces, in her fit of frantic anguish, she screams, “MY CHRISTIAN DIOR PURSE!” This purse, baby pink, bean-shaped, with a beaded-pearl strap, gold hardware, and a quiet logo tucked under the flap, was different from the sequined, glamazon Fendi Baguettes that defined earlier seasons. Nor did it have the embellished, maximalist appeal of the Saddle, which, by Season 3, had practically taken up permanent residence on Carrie’s arm.
No, this dear reader, is the Dior Malice.
With Malice Aforethought
Almost exactly a year before Carrie was careening into the Central Park lake with Mr. Big – the date is October 4, 1999 – John Galliano was backstage at the Louvre, minutes before Christian Dior’s Spring/Summer 2000 ready-to-wear collection was about to be presented at Paris Fashion Week.
In the front row sat figures whose presence at a French couture house would’ve been, only five years ago, sacrilegious.
“For many,” wrote Osman Ahmed for Another Magazine, “the house embodied quintessential, ladylike glamour, and thus operated as a symbol of 50s femininity and the bourgeoisie.” Galliano himself said, ‘“Someone has to take Dior into the 21st century – even if it’s kicking and screaming.’”
“All of a sudden,” continues Ahmed, “P. Diddy and Foxy Brown were in the court of Christian Dior, redefining what it might mean to be Dior’s clientele.”
On the runway, meanwhile, Galliano is doing what Galliano does. Set to Lauryn Hill’s “Everything Is Everything,” the models wear caramel-tinted sunglasses, their bundled, dreadlocked hair tied up just like Hill’s. There are monogram denim Dior boots, cuffed at the knee. There are cropped leather hoodie gilets, horse-bit halter necks, and silk logo skirts, hung loosely below mid-riffs, glistening with the sweat of a spring/summer collection.
In this fever dream, two bags stood out.
The first is the one you know all too well: the Saddle, asymmetric and immediately iconic, the one that would go on to be carried by Carrie Bradshaw, Paris Hilton, Nicole Richie, and every influencer with a working Instagram and a (somewhat) working knowledge of the Y2K revival.
The second, set in the same sweat-slicked campaign, photographed atop model Elsa Benitez by Patrick Demarchelier for the March 2000 issue of Marie Claire, and rendered in the equally quintessential denim, snakeskin, leopard calf, and of course, that baby pink leather, was the Malice.
Yet, it never quite lived up to its more popular sibling.
Back From the Lake
“The supremacy of the It-bag,” wrote Vanessa Friedman in a damningarticle titled “Is the Handbag Over?” for the New York Times, “that millennial symbol of arrival that was a flag on the arm to alert a wider world to an individual’s currency, taste and achievement, has fractured along with the wider culture.” Demand for women’s handbags in general is down 5.5% year on year (searches for briefcases, meanwhile, are up 14%).
British Vogue, more dramatically, took to announcing the death of the crossbody bag: “editors and influencers tend to hop in and out of a car with just a phone and a Rhode lip balm for company (leaving their bag of crap with their driver)” One commentator even went onto note “A massive corporate logo slapped on a bag is a shorthand for people who want the status without the plot.” Friedman concludes with a certain relish, “If you are paying attention to that adage about dressing for the job you want (or the job you just got), the power move is to lose the handbag.”
And if these fashion publications are to be believed, things have truly never been this dire.
Enter – Jonathan Anderson.
For his Spring 2026 debut at Dior – which, for the record, received a standing ovation – he retired the all-caps logo introduced under Maria Grazia Chiuri and restored the original Cochin typeface, a direct line back to Christian Dior’s 1946 founding. The collection also featured a Book Tote rendering of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. For Fall 2026, he took us on a trip through Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries and gave us those Lily Pad heels. Not to mention, for Cruise 2027, he went head-to-head with Matthieu Blazy over the ownership of the newsprint!
Whimsy – and the art of not taking oneself so seriously – is back at Dior.
And under Anderson, it has its own creative language, distinct from the former hyperdependence on the cannage and monogram motifs. “For all its commercial dominance,” wrote fashion critic Charles Royle, “Dior has not had a legible creative identity in a long time. The last time you could look at a logo-less Dior garment and place it within a coherent, continuous vision was Galliano.”
And the Malice, with its quietly tucked monogram and Sex and the City timestamp, exists in that same extended Anderson universe, yours to be had in an endless array of whimsical fabrications if you’re willing to scroll far enough.
Because in an age when the Times is eulogizing the handbag and trend-cycles move at the lightning speed of a TikTok scroll, there is something genuinely restorative about hunting down a playful, pearl-strapped, baby-pink bag that once took a dip in the Central Park Lake.
