Camera Bags: Dated Trend or Wardrobe Classic? 

Lights, camera, snap! 

Did I just attempt to live my paparazzi-fueled fantasies by appropriating the public-facing, painfully scrutinized life of a front-page socialite down to a few mere clicks of the shutterbugs? Certainly (maybe) not.

What I did try to achieve with this little exercise was reminisce the days when we’d whip a little contraption out of our persons to capture life’s beautiful moments forever: why, the camera, of course! 

In fact, like print media tabloids, the Polaroid harks back to a simpler time. Today, we may be armed with our iPhones, photographic prowess a filter away. But does that make us all photographers? Are we really capturing what’s meaningful? 

It’s as Laura Antonia Jordan writes for Elle: “Thanks to the Internet, everyone can express an opinion very publicly and very immediately. But does that make everyone a critic? Absolutely not.” Same principle, really.

And the camera bag today, like much else in fashion derived from utilitarian origins, couldn’t be further from its originally intended purpose—to house an actual photographic apparatus. So, as these little darlings of the luxury conglomerate machination make yet another comeback to the style scene, it’s worth exploring first how exactly the camera bag—the OG—came into being.

Camera Bags… for Actual Cameras

The history of the camera bag dates back to the 1970s – more specifically, to 1975. Before that, hauling photographic equipment meant hauling equally hulking gear: hard-shelled cases, sturdy for shipping, but brutal on the photog on the go.

Enter – Jim Domke, a photojournalist and editor for The Philadelphia Inquirer. 

Dismayed at the dearth of convenient, portable, and travel-friendly camera gear (especially for long-distance assignments), Domke devised his own design, enlisting the aid of a custom canvas tent maker and other fellow photographers, to eventually create the Domke F-2. 

With twelve compartments and a padded insert with four extra pockets, the F-2 remains a bestseller for the prototype’s present owner, Tiffen, but also the preferred gear among the White House Photographers Association!

And thanks to Domke’s breakthrough design, camera bags have since proliferated, albeit among a niche category of users who identify themselves as passionate photographers (like our very own Vlad here).

The Leap: From Function to Fashion

But these camera bags have nothing in common with those that have populated the luxury sphere today. Petite yet practical, structured yet spacious, they were perfect for those chunky little point-and-shoot cameras of the early aughts, and therefore, expert estimates (the expert, in this case, being me) trace their origins to somewhere around that time as well (some of the earliest Chanel examples date back to the 90s!)

Even though they wouldn’t quite fit an SLR camera, they’d fit nearly everything else you could possibly need on a daily basis—a phone, a full-sized wallet, a water bottle, and an umbrella—with more room to spare!

So, as the mini-bag trend was powering its way through the 2010s, the camera bag rose as a formidable contender, popping up simultaneously in the SS15 collections of JW Anderson, designed to perfectly house a Nikon 1 camera, and Stella McCartney, whose Linda Camera bag (named after McCartney’s mother) could accommodate the world’s smallest DSLR camera, the Canon EOS 100D White.

With the style taking off, the rest of the fashion world quickly took note, as everyone from Nicolas Ghesquière at Louis Vuitton to Alessandro Michele at Gucci launched their respective reinterpretations of the design.

Plus, it wasn’t just the utility of the silhouette that accounted for its popularity—a step up from the wallet-on-chain yet smaller than a regular shoulder bag, the camera bag fell in the sweet spot price-wise, too. Gucci’s massively marketable Soho Disco (designed by Frida Giannini pre-Michele) and Marmont Camera Bag, for instance, routinely made rounds as THE designer bags to have under the $1,000 price point!

For a moment, it seemed like camera bags were en route to becoming a true wardrobe classic. Amanda went so far as to declare, “I believe that camera bags are truly, genuinely the most useful of the widely available bag styles.”

From the Dust Returned

Like all good things, however, the camera bag, too, ended its tenure – surprisingly enough, right at the onset of the pandemic. 

In fact, when hands-free, convenient crossbodies reigned supreme across much of our quarantine-induced quandaries, camera bags largely disappeared, seemingly a blip in our handbag radars, quickly to be replaced by trending 90s-shoulder bags.

And even though they didn’t go away in their entirety (some ladies, after all, continue to swear by them regardless of the ruling trends), their return by now is long overdue, especially as we continue to tire of the ludicrously large new offerings the heritage houses continue to churn out season after season.

Perhaps it is for this reason that Chanel, for its Cruise 2025 lineup, brought forth an entirely new breed of camera-style purses (which some have since likened to a whimsical bar of soap) – engraved with the quintessential 31, Rue Cambon address of its flagship store – to revive the glory days of the camera bag.

But really, camera bags have managed to achieve a rare sense of aesthetic harmony few others have in the world of fashion: the zip closure for absolute security, the crossbody strap for freedom of mobility, and the bag itself, a canvas for creativity. 

Across the body, they elevate your basic athleisure sweatpants. Carried as a clutch, they can look just as dressy as a formal ensemble, casual cool notwithstanding. The only thing it can’t do? Well, hold an actual camera, for one.

But hey, that’s what you’ve got your phone for, right?