I’m on the record as not being a major fan of of novelty bags, and that’s only become a more solidified opinion as the trend has worn on. We, the great handbag-buying populace, seem to have beaten it back in almost all situations, and the novelty purses that makes it through now are generally pretty cute in one way or another. The Anya Hindmarch Pouch Fox Clutch and its two little friends, which I just spotted this week, maybe very well be the cutest of all.
The reason these designs work for my where so many others fail is because they exploit a phenomenon that’s already baked into the design of so many bags: they sort of look like faces, from the right angle. Hindmarch, in her witty way, uses the existing elements of any bag to turn little crossbody clutches into a fox, bear and husky dog. They’re not big or ridiculous, and they don’t require much suspension of belief to see what’s going on, even though all the bags have is a little bit of well-placed trim to make them look like their namesake critters. If all novelty bags were this adorable and this intelligently conceived, I might have been a fan from the beginning.