To loosely paraphrase Flannery O’Conner, a good minibag is hard to find. The marketplace is overflowing with them at the moment, and finding one of these diminutive bags with just the right combination of color, texture and functionality is a task that I’ve found thus far to be insurmountable. At this size, every detail has to be perfect.
So, does the Antik Batik Havana Minibag pass the test? Maybe so. The more I look at it, the more interested I become, and the more I think about buying it. Help me decide.
I’m normally skeptical of faux exotics, but this bag’s designers did a good job making sure that they picked a material with that flakey python look, as opposed to leathers that employ a more solid embossing technique, and it’s to their credit. The faux python gives the bag great texture, and the bright pink color highlights it in a way that a darker or neutral color wouldn’t.
Flap bags aren’t the most functional things that you can find out there, and you usually don’t see them on a bag with such tiny proportions. Because of that, however, I think this bag totally works. It’s unexpectedly structured, but the juxtaposition of that rigidity and traditional construction with the wild material totally works. Well, it works for me, at least – I tend to like things to be just a little bit off. Buy through ShopBop for $252.
