Is the Pashli Next on the Archival Revival Train?

The year, dear reader, was 2011.

24-year-old Swedish newspaper editor, Elin Kling had just cofounded NowManifest, a fashion blog aggregator platform. One of the blogging OGs, Kling had previously launched Styled by Kling in 2007, emerging as the most-followed blogger in Sweden in just two days. Today, she is the co-founder of quiet luxury-darling label, Totême.

2011 was also the year Amber Venz rolled out RewardStyle, the very prototype of today’s affiliate marketing model where bloggers get paid commissions per clicks. Blogger Tavi Gevinson was running Rookie, redefining what a teen could do in fashion, and our very own PurseBlog had just turned six.

Blogging was its own little beast. NY-blogger Arabelle Sicardi (who’d launched her blog, Fashion Pirate, as a 14-year old!) summed it up, “We were all very, very close… We went to each other’s houses for birthdays. We swapped clothes. We were more of a sisterhood.” It was intimate. It was electric.

And it was then that a hitherto unknown American label dropped Girls on Bikes – an incredible commercial clocking in just under two minutes featuring – you guessed it, a slew of style-savvy, stiletto-clad fashion girlies on bikes. Atop their bike baskets? A spanking new satchel.

This, dear reader, was the Pashli, a logo-less, utilitarian, almost anti-It bag, if you will, with a structured silhouette, sharkskin-embossed leather, and zipped “wings” reminiscent of Celine’s celebrity-beloved Luggage Tote. Only the Pashli, from the house of 3.1 Phillip Lim, retailed for roughly for $895.

Suffice to say, the blogging world lost its mind.

Today, over a decade after its launch, fashion finds itself circling those familiar conversations once again: influence, commerce, taste, and nostalgia.

“Are you selling out if you run ads and use affiliates? Can everyone be a writer? Are you a writer or are you an influencer? And is the latter embarrassing?” questions Emilia Patriarca, who operates on the newest frontier of blogs – Substack. So, is it time the Pashli too circled back?

Passion for the Pashli

It made sense to call the campaign Girls on Bikes; Lim’s Pashli, after all, was literally inspired by women on bicycles: “I was so enchanted with this idea of, when I traveled to different cities where the mode of transportation was bicycles, I would see the most chic people on them. It was so effortless in the way they conducted themselves, but also looking so put-together.”

And it was that effortless cool that Lim directly translated into a bag: structured but not stiff, hardware but not excess, practical yet polished, on-trend, but not try-hard. “It goes back to that versatility,” says Rickie De Sole, the VP fashion director at Nordstrom, “It wasn’t heavy on logomania. It meets the needs of the working woman with a life to live.”

In fact, with a design scheme that did most of the heavy lifting – expandable zip gussets, a top handle for polish, and a sturdy silhouette – it captured that very specific space in the It-bag ecosystem between its luxuriously ubiquitous flared-gusset sibling, the Celine Luggage Tote, and the blindingly colorful Bal City bags the Hiltons and the Kardashians had toted into oblivion.

Because the Pashli wasn’t popular just for being stateside starlet arm-candy, you only knew about it if you did your homework – or read the right blogs. Jack Savoie of @thesavoiedaily declared: “This bag, Celine sunnies, Acne Pistol boots #fromwhereistand shot was the recipe for peak cool-girl content!” 

In and Out of the Lim-light

But then again, as Vogue writes, “it remains hard to place exactly where Lim fits in the fashion zodiac. The fanfare is quieter than the breathless adoration that attends industry darlings like Proenza Schouler or Rodarte, and Lim doesn’t have the identifiable cheering section of Hollywood alterna-stars.”

His work has since been dubbed too “accessible” or “commercial” – more critique than compliment, something that Lim himself has commented upon: “The irony of this brand is that people think we are commercial. But I want to change c-o-m-m-e-r-c-i-a-l to c-o-m-m-u-n-i-c-a-t-i-o-n.” Clothes for real people, real lives – on the street, at the office, on a bike.

Yes, his early Met Gala dates (Alexa Chung, Solange) embody that particular giddy era when fashion-blogging was new and cool, and yes, he rose to fame at a time when downtown-chic and LCD Soundsystem were all the vibe. But here was also a designer, born in Thailand and transplanted from LA, who’d arrived in New York in 2004 without just grit and instinct, not a stacked résumé.

“There was no groundwork. It was purely from a place of need, want, and why not,” he adds, “We were young professionals coming up, working for a living and paying bills, but we also wanted to have nice things and dream up designs that we could afford and that our friends could afford.” 

It was thus that the Pashli of 2011, his first (and possibly only) true it-bag, emerged as the manifestation of his shoot-by-the-hips ethos. It managed to capture the moment when blogging, editorials, street-style photographers, and Instagram were all converging – but not for long.

Women discovered him via Barney’s, or through Serena van der Woodsen (who notably carried the Pashli), and they stayed for Lim’s design dogma: “We were and are our audience. We were and are the consumer.” But in a market increasingly driven by “the next thing,” standing still can sometimes feel like falling behind.

And Lim never went on to have a second act, and no new runaway hit followed. The silence, on his part, was intentional.

Is the Internet the Archival Oracle?

Then again, work in fashion long enough, and you learn that what’s “over” has a way of rising again. And bloggers, more than a decade after the Golden Era of Fashion Blogging, have been noting the quiet re-emergence of the Pashli.

“I recently resurrected my 3.1 Phillip Lim Pashli, and it’s just as great of a work bag now as it was when I bought it nearly a decade ago,” says Leah Faye Cooper, Vogue’s digital style director. “I remember debating the $350 purchase at a sample sale… my sister and sister-in-law told me I had to get it – it was fab and I’d keep it forever. They were right.”

And Alejandro of the prescient Instagram @y2kbags told InStyle last year, “Just letting you all know, the 3.1 Phillip Lim Pashli is absolutely making a comeback!” He then went on to make note of today’s nostalgic revivals, “Most bags that were hot at one point and then faded out tend to make a comeback,” before adding, “Because once a hot bag, always a hot bag.” Stylist and content creator Tina Leung, too, is eager to take her first-gen Pashli out of the closet.

Yet, Phillip Lim has never been one to chase nostalgia. In his SS24 lineup, a lace dress covered in hand-appliquéd rosettes inspired by a 2007 design (everyone murmurs, “Beautiful,” writes Harper’s) is “sort of an ‘if you know you know’ thing, and that’s the furthest thing I’ll look back at.” 

“With fashion, it’s all about the present, the evolution,” he adds.

Ironically enough, he also just revived the Pashli earlier this month.

Did Lim feel the pressure from his peers – the digital editors, the bloggers who first amplified and took him to stardom in the first place? Or is it because nearly every one of his contemporaries are currently on the archival revival train?

Or perhaps it simply is the brand’s natural evolution? What do you think – does the Pashli capture the present moment, or is it just a nostalgic cash grab?