How a Boring Black Bag Saved My Life

It was on a quiet and otherwise peaceful early-January morning that I received a one-sentence text that, quite literally, was about to turn my life upside down: “You’re the Valedictorian!”

I quickly scanned through what I’d been upto over the better part of college: obsessing over the fit of jeans, worrying about that extra inch which magically materialized over the waistband every time I squeezed myself into my go-to pair of skinnies, and of course, picking out the right oversized bag whose sheer largeness would strategically offset said confounding extra inch. Or two.

Nothing that qualified me for something of Elle Woods’ stature, certainly. Or at least, that’s what my imposter syndrome would have me believe.

Yet there I was, being serenaded by commendation and congratulations over a truly once-in-a-lifetime achievement. Only, I wasn’t there; I was roughly 2,000 miles away in a horrifyingly isolating foreign nation on the verge of international dispute. I was a graduate, but I couldn’t attend my graduation.

Of course, in the post-pandemic world, the logistical scars of this was fairly minimal, nothing Zoom and fluorescent studio lighting couldn’t fix.

The psychological toll, however, was immense. Typical modes of distraction like Instagram and nightly scrolls on TheRealReal — not to mention the unrelenting stampede of bad news — were anything but soothing. My heavily worn-in PS1 felt too spirited, my monogrammed Montsouris too flashy, my silver Burberry Rucksack too festive. Instead, what I slipped on was a fairly nondescript – almost boring, if I may say so – black bag.

And I haven’t slipped it off ever since.

Introducing: the Boring Bag

Dear reader, I am tired. The bag market is bloated. Eye-wateringly priced (and completely unoriginal) designs do zilch for our daily needs. Archival revivals are everywhere you look. There are simply too many bags out there that are all either too big, too small, too awkwardly-shaped, or too cheaply-made, and there’s at once too much and too little to choose from.

There are also the questions and criticisms about whether the new designers’ interpretations of brands look or feel the way they should. Are Jonathan Anderson’s Dior cargo shorts evocative enough of Christian Dior’s vision? Is Matthieu Blazy’s distorted, destroyed Chanel 2.55 appropriately representative of Coco Chanel’s functional, female-forward design? Or is Demna’s Gucci inherently more Gucci than Sabato de Sarno’s Gucci or even Alessandro Michele’s Gucci? What even is Gucci, if not the product of all who shaped it?

Add to this creeping sense of fatigue my own despondent state of mind, and it was at this juncture that I realized – perhaps for the first time since the saturation of the trend, or really, the first time ever – the true meaning of quiet luxury, as it was intended to be, overplayed as it may be. Because luxury is innately meant to be a quiet, private experience, free from the vagaries of branding and marketing. The name-tag on your clothes is on the inside for a reason, you know. And yes, I say that as a marketing grad myself.

Enter – my compact, logoless, luxurious, new (to me) carryall from the one enigmatic Issey Miyake.

The Black Turtleneck, Reincarnated

When Steve Jobs passed away on October 5, 2011, high-end knitwear label St. Croix jumped in to take (implicit) credit for the iconic black mock-turtleneck sweater that had become a staple of the late Apple founder’s repertoire, alongside the quintessential lightwash Levi’s and New Balance sneakers.

It was later when Walter Isaacson’s much-anticipated biography of Jobs dropped that there came to the forefront the story of the tech-maven’s kinship with Japanese designer Issey Miyake, the real architect of the fabled sweater. Commissioned by Jobs after a 1980 trip to Japan to meet Sony chairman, Akio Morita, where he was marveled at the idea of a workplace uniform (though the rest of his workforce responded with a near-unanimous ‘no way’), the garment (“he made me like a hundred of them.” Jobs later told of Miyake), along with the jeans and the jawns, quickly became a cornerstone of his personal style (other problematic queens like Elizabeth Holmes soon followed suit).

And while Miyake phased out the piece from his collection in memoriam of his dear friend, the black turtleneck went onto have a status of its own. At once intellectual, yet intensely seductive, its light asphyxiation on the neck erotic, its coverage on the skin a protective armor (after all, it was Nora Ephron who’d written in her book I Feel Bad About My Neck, “Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth”) the turtleneck has become a totem of protest.

Somehow, my own Kevlar-strong black bag from Miyake’s Design Studio felt like a natural reincarnation of that iconic black turtleneck in purse-form, a protestation against the flashy, fabulous, fashion-forward carries brands passionately peddle to us, a functional plate that armors your necessities without the uptightness of a briefcase, and, as Liana Satenstein puts it, “a chic cockroach of a carryall that can survive a nuclear war of trends.”

All You Need is Less

Now, all this to say, the bag in question is itself a rather simple and straightforward affair; hence, the boring moniker.

Sure, it’s sleek, slick and sexy, equally at home on a Fall ’98 sweat-slathered Tom Ford-Gucci model as it is on a Donna Karan or Yohji Yamamoto editorial from the ’80s. In the post-Working Girl fashion world of all-black livery, my precious Issey find would look just as good on a modern-day Grace Coddington or Carine Roitfeld, retailing for thousands of dollars on a swanky boutique shelf, as it would on dangling from the rack of a Phnom Penh thrift store retailing for 14 bucks, ready to be snagged by the likes of yours truly.

In a world of a thousand sparkly Chanels and candy-colored Birkins that the likes of Lauren Conrad would carry, my versatile vintage treasure is the bag- equivalent of the no-nonsense Kelly Cutrone who tells off Conrad for mispronouncing Hamish Bowles on The Hills (death by a thousand Cutrone cuts, ouch!) Its all-black exterior is as powerful as it is neutral – neutral in denotation rather than connotation, if you will. Daniel Roseberry of Schiaparelli famously said, black puts the “black” in black-tie.

And as I buttoned up into my own black-tie suit at a studio thousands of miles away from my actual college convocation as the absent Valedictorian, surrounded not by the proud faces of parents, teachers and friends, but the unfamiliar profiles of foreign photographers ready to broadcast my virtual farewell speech to the class of 2026 (which, in hindsight, was a rather glamorous, Carrie Bradshaw-esque affair on its own right), my boring black Issey bag, chock-full of tchotchkes and printed paper, marinating on the studio dressing table, felt strangely familiar.

It’s something I can wear with anything and everything, day in and day out, regardless of where I am in the world and who I’m surrounded by. Which isn’t to say I don’t want my more interesting, more personality-laden items anymore. It’s just that sometimes, a simple presence is all you need in life.

I make sure to give the bag a tight little hug at the end of the shoot.