A Review and Reveal of a Prized Balenciaga Throwback from the Early Aughts

“The TikTok generation/Instagram influencers ruined it all.”

Bemoaned commenter Playboy Mommy when I questioned last week if NYFW was dead, had been dead for a while now, or was about to be dead soon.

She isn’t wrong, though. After all, much of the present woes of the fashion industry can be attributed to the influencer inferno, which is TikTok and Instagram. 

They’ve made a mass spectacle out of what was essentially a universe that thrived in exclusion. Runway presentations – packed with influencers to the point that it’s a safety hazard – are live-streamed and consumed in concurrence not just by showgoers but by millions, if not billions, of John and Jane Does around the world. 

And that makes them dreadfully easy to despise.

But labels must also rely on them; at the end of the day, merch must be merchandised, deals must be made, and money must be made. A great deal of it can be made via influencer marketing – up to $5.78 for every dollar spent, to be precise. It’s a delicate balance, and brands haven’t done a particularly good job of striking it so far.

Yet, despite their downsides, I’d argue that the influencer, or at least the idea of the influencer, is integral to fashion. And a particularly coveted handbag I’ve finally got my hands on wouldn’t exist without them! Excited? We’re just getting started!

Kate Moss, Influencer Extraordinaire

Now, let’s leave all of that in the present and go back in time – to the origins of the influencer. Good old Merriam-Webster defines it as “one who exerts influence: a person who inspires or guides the actions of others.” By that definition, everybody from Jesus the Lord to Jesus from Britain’s Got Talent potentially classifies.

As far as handbags are concerned, though (this is a handbag site, after all), many of our contemporary classics (some might say, it-bags) owe their namesakes—nay, their entire existences—to the class of influencers known as the it-girls. 

Would the Hermès Birkin exist had Madame Birkin not bumped into Monsieur Dumas on that fateful Air France flight? Would we still not associate the Baguette with the French boulangerie had Carrie Bradshaw not been robbed of her Fendi rendition on prime-time network television? Where would the it-bag even be had there been no it-girl in the first place? 

What is the it-girl if not a primitive influencer?

But even among it-girls stands a towering presence, a true force of fashion, and it-girl extraordinaire, Mrs. Kate Moss. Maureen Callahan, author of Champagne Supernovas: Kate Moss, Marc Jacobs, Alexander McQueen, and the ’90s Renegades Who Remade Fashion, sums up her impact succinctly: “What Kate wore, whether on the street or the red carpet was much cooler to them than what she modeled. Her paparazzi photos were becoming indistinguishable from her editorials.”

It was Mrs. Moss who, at the height of the bizarre cultural cornucopia that was the Y2K, spearheaded the inception of what was to become my own personal holy grail – a limited edition, first-generation Balenciaga Motorcycle bag. 

The Rise and Rise of the Motorcycle Bag

Now, the saga of the legendary BBag, alternately known as the Le Dix, Le City, the Lariat, the Classique, or the Motorcycle, is truly the stuff of fashion folklore. 

Four years into Creative Directorship at Balenciaga, Nicolas Ghesquière devised the prototype for a slouchy little leather satchel accented with studs, buckles, and zippers pulled by long lariat tassels (hence the name). A dramatic departure from the sleek, stiff, and logo-laden receptacles that were the norm of the nineties, the BBag failed to inspire confidence from Kering’s investors who’d freshly acquired the brand.

It was, instead, the models – chief among them the singular Kate Moss at the peak of her prominence – who found the wrinkly little thing endearing, asking Ghesquière, “What is that? Is it vintage? Is it something that you found at the flea market?”

So, it was really to satiate Mrs. Moss’ fancies (and when Mrs. Moss fancied it, you’d better satiate it) that the designer decided to go ahead with the production of 25 original pieces of the Moto bag, gifting them all to eminent editors and industry insiders, like Carine Roitfeld, Emmanuelle Alt, and Marie-Amélie Sauvé. Like Moss and her off-duty, girl-next-door glam, the Lariat felt reassuringly familiar and insouciantly cool.

As Ghesquière later confides to WWD: “Women and girls thought it was something they’d always have. It was a new, fresh thing but looked like an old, good, friendly thing.” 

“You could be a Balenciaga girl with that bag,” he adds.

Now I’m a Balenciaga Girl, Too!

Since then, the BBag has been snapped, papped, and tapped into countless times on the arms of the Olsens, the Hiltons, the Kardashians, and their collective grandmothers. And somewhere in between their Starbucks Frappuccino runs stateside shopping sprees and red-carpet appearances, it’d become a rite of passage in fulfilling the it-girl prophecy, rising and falling with the tides of it-dom before recently reappearing in the arms of Mrs. Moss herself.

It is at this juncture, dear reader, that yours truly was able to snag a forgotten relic from that first season of the Lariat – the F/W2001 Balenciaga Le Dix Tote in Burgundy with flat brass hardware (although some records suggest it might belong to the second season of the lineup – S/S2002).

Crafted from Kevlar-strong Caribou leather, the tote version lacks the high-profile visibility of the First bag that’s more readily associated with the BBag silhouette (which is why I suspect it wasn’t snapped up by another enterprising buyer before I could get my hands on it), but it is also more spacious as a result (it actually fits a MacBook!). All while also being bang on trend with the recent movement towards slim purses.

If anything, in fact, its unconventional design makes it even more special than the average Lariat (even though the Lariat – the moniker now generally reserved for the early collections – is by no means average), much like how Kate Moss adored her own (even rarer) hobo version of the bag. And I simply can’t wait to dig into mine and live my own noughties’ Balenciaga darling life!

Ultimately, influencers might not be, as Vogue waxes poetic, “those prognosticators, those sartorial canaries in the coal mine,” today as it-girls once were. But to think that the very BBag that sits in my closet as we speak might have brushed shoulders with one that made it onto Kate Moss’ closet is, to say the least, simply exhilarating!