Bags in the Wild has been part of PurseBlog for years, and if your comments are anything to go by, it is the part many of you come back for.
The idea has never changed. We go where people actually carry their bags, the US Open, the busy NYC Upper East Side, a Tuesday afternoon in SoHo, weekends in Miami’s Design District, and we photograph what we see.
Not a lookbook, not a runway, not a carefully lit product shot. Real people, on real streets, with the bag they chose to carry that day.
That last part matters to us more than anything else.
Every photograph in Bags in the Wild is taken by our own team. Sometimes by me, other times by our freelance photographers. Nothing comes from a press office, a launch kit, or a gifted must-have of the season.
What our photographers notice is what a bag looks like on an actual person, in actual weather, at the end of an actual day. That is the truest picture of current bag culture we know how to give you, and it shifts month to month in ways no trend report catches.
Until now, those photographs lived inside the articles they were shot for. Want to see what people were carrying in New York last May? You had to know which post to open. So we built something better.
The Field Guide is every Bags in the Wild photograph we have ever published, on one endless page, newest first. More than two thousand four hundred photographs at the moment, going back to 2021, and it grows every time we publish a new story.
A few things worth noting:
Hover any photo (on your phone, tap it) for the bag’s name and a link to shop it. Open it full screen and swipe through the set.
Each story is marked by its lead photo, with the month and the place, so you always know where you are.
Jump through time. A timeline down the side lets you drop straight into any month or year and see what people were carrying then. Desktop only, for now.
It keeps going. Scroll and the page loads more, all the way back to the beginning.
This is a first version, and we would rather build the next one with you than guess.
What would make it more useful? Search by brand? Filtering by city? A way to save favorites? Tell us in the comments, and if something looks wrong, tell us that too.
Check out the Field Guide here or using the navigation in the site header. We’re looking forward to your feedback.
Cheers!
