No Matter Your Budget, Embossed Crocodile is The Bag Trend to Watch

We noticed a funny little thing while scrolling through new spring arrivals recently

With some trends, it’s easy to trace them back to a particular source: an It Bag, a designer that takes a risk and reaps the rewards while everyone plays catchup, nostalgia for a particular era and its key aesthetic signifiers. And then there are those that just pop up occasionally with what feels like a limited initial push, and suddenly they’re everywhere. That seems to be the case with embossed croc: it was out of favor, and now it’s back.

My best guess is that all of this connects back, in a somewhat tenuous way, to Saint Laurent. Although the brand’s handbag aesthetic has stagnated a bit during the transition from former designer Hedi Slimane to new creative director Anthony Vaccarello, its use of embossed crocodile leather has stayed constant—and consistently popular. For a couple years, it was the only big designer doing it, but for spring, faux croc has started to pop up in a number of different price ranges.

From the anecdotal evidence of my personal research, crocodile seems most popular among mid-tier premier designers and contemporary brands. And that makes sense, because most of the top-tier premier designers like Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Hermès make a significant number of bags in actual exotic leathers. Doing both in the same line runs the risk of devaluing the perception of the real thing, so most designers who can sell a significant number of $25,000 bags stick with that.

For those of us with less fantastical budgets, though, there’s some faux croc at every budget, which unfortunately varies a great deal in quality. My favorite embossed exotics don’t try so hard to convince you that they’re actually the real thing; instead, they take the idea of crocodile and stylize it in some way so it doesn’t feel like imitation. Also, personally, I think the best faux versions tend to be matte, but if you want some gloss in your life, I won’t stop you. Check out over a dozen strong representations of this burgeoning trend below.