For The Love Of The Mary Poppins Bag
A trend report from a very exhausted grad student
The tiny purse is dead. To me, at least.
No more bags that can barely fit your phone, a tube of lip gloss, maybe a set of keys, or your Airpods case (if you’re lucky). As I’ve been finishing up my grad program, I’ve been craving something cavernous, the kind of bag that you need about a whole minute to sift through to find what you’re looking for, the kind that doesn’t tear under the weight of a bunch of books and the chaotic detritus of an unraveling life.
I’ve taken to calling them Mary Poppins Bags after the magical, extra-dimensional carpet bag that can conjure up items at will. A Mary Poppins Bag can be a tote, a backpack, a shoulder bag, a cross body. Campy floral patterns are not required, but certainly welcome. As are weird structural shapes, garish color palettes, and funky textures. The Mary Poppins Bag is the bag that can truly carry it all. It contains anything you might ever want or need. Yeah, it’s convenient but it’s not effortless either. As you fill up your bag with all kinds of things, the weight of its disorganized contents presses against your shoulder, reminding you of its capacity to endlessly accumulate all of the things that comprise your identity and existence on this earth.
The feminized obsession to carry everything, to imbue objects with the weight of our own emotionality, to let our array of trinkets and tools speak for our mental state when words do not feel like enough. We dump out our bags and tell strangers on the Internet what’s in them. Sometimes we eschew bags all together, twisting our fingers into hooked claws of maximized transportation efficiency. In the attempts (and failures) to define “recession-core,” our things have gotten smaller, but somehow our bags have gotten bigger. In a time of scarcity, there’s the impulse to gather, hoard, collect, adorn, to not let go of anything no matter how much it may burden us.
Earlier this year, we said goodbye to French New Wave style icon Jane Birkin. Hermès’s eponymous Birkin bag was partly inspired by Birkin’s struggle to find a weekender. The story goes that in 1984 Birkin accidentally spilled the contents of her bag in front of Hermès chairman Jean-Louis Dumas on a flight to London. Not realizing who he was at first, Birkin complained about not having enough space and pockets to carry everything. As the two began to discuss the brand’s limitations and Birkin’s own need for a carry-all as a young mother, Dumas and Birkin sketched out the preliminary design for the Hermès Birkin per Birkin’s requests to have a bag that was more oversized, secure, and comfortable to travel with.
While The Birkin™ has developed a reputation for being an overpriced, hard-to-obtain status symbol, Jane herself used it in ways that would make luxury collectors and resellers wince. It was constantly packed to the brim with books, binders, coats, makeup pouches. She’d also paint the bag, paste images on the leather exterior, and decorate the handles with beads, keychains, and trinkets that followed her like a twinkling symphony everywhere she went. “That was the new [trend], that girls had masses of things in their handbag. And so, although I would’ve loved to have been a sort of neat of person…” She lamented in a 2018 interview with CBS, “...everything [inside] is useful; it just weighs a ton.”
Recent runways have been full of variations on the Mary Poppins Bag. Balenciaga’s S/S 2024 show featured several Birkin-esque leather bags with dangling charms and tassels. Miu Miu sent stuffed bucket bags and bulging purses with customized adornments down the runway too, although shoe heels jutting out from the unzipped bags along with packed in pieces of underwear sought to make clutter feel chic. Bottega Venetta has been no stranger to the oversized, over-packed bag, sending variations of their woven leather totes down the runway each season. Telfar elevated its brand to cult status thanks to their highly-coveted Shopping Bags, known as the “Bushwick Birkin” for their accessibility, color range, and style variations.
But practical doesn’t mean that it has to be boring. I think many of us tend to leave the “ludicrous” part out of the “ludicrously capacious bag.” The original Mary Poppins Bag was, after all, tacky, a little outdated, toeing the line between trendy and timeless. Coperni, king of the quirky purse, deviated from their experiments to create a heart-shaped tote that balances minimalism with viral-worthy cuteness. Ulla Johnson’s S/S 2024 show had models carrying bags bursting with fringe. As always, Schiaparelli added its surrealist spin on classic tote designs. Sarawong played with translucence to add a floral boost to the typical shopping bag silhouette.
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I’ve been thinking a lot about how Baggu, already an Internet darling, found a new surge in popularity thanks to people posting on TikTok about how much they can fit inside their shoulder and crescent bags. I’m talking about multiple wine bottles, snacks, phones and wallets of all sizes, giant metal water bottles, books, even laptops (with a case, charger, and everything!). There’s something so thrilling about watching people test the limits of these nylon bags, the rush of excitement when they pull out some unexpected item that couldn’t possibly fit in there. It’s like the scene from Mary Poppins all over again: any whim or worry you might have as some chronically online, twenty-something can be fixed with a magical rummaging through your Baggu.
Beyond that, Baggu bags have become status symbols of functionality and their users have begun to incorporate elements of their own personal style into the brand’s practical designs. When Baggu’s highly anticipated collaboration with Sandy Liang dropped at a higher price point than usual and sold out immediately, many refused to fall for the trap of bow-induced inflation and took matters into their own hands. Now TikTok is full of DIY tutorials and little experiments in sewing, beading, lace trimming, and bow tying that turned the trendy into something true to self.
I’ve been waxing poetic about the beauty of spacious bags without talking about the Mary Poppins Bag in my life. Part of what prompted this entire obsession was my decision to purchase this oversized quilted crossbody from COS right before the semester started. The photos don’t do it justice. It’s cartoonishly massive, like a modern-day version of a sack of wares you might bring with you on a medieval quest. It sags, it gets lumpy, bulges with things. Some reviews warn that the puffy quilted effect will stretch out over time.
Yet, I love it. Precisely for those traits. When I’m on the train, it takes up space on my lap like an unruly pet. It’s the only bag that can hold everything I carry each day on top of smatterings of oversized, hardback academic books. It’s never full, or at least I haven’t reached its spatial limits just yet. I appreciate its awkwardness, the way I have to take an extra minute to find what I’m looking for, the way things get lost in its fabric-lined abyss. Eventually, I’ll tie a ribbon around the handle, maybe add some charms or a keychain to it. Ursula K. Le Guin reminds us that “the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container.” If we think of stories as vessels, carrier bags for people, and feelings, and politics, and histories, how do our bags reveal that material impulse to tell stories, craft narratives about ourselves, present our tastes and sensibilities with others, our impulse to make, improvise, and customize? “Still the story isn't over,” Le Guin writes, “Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.” For now, my Mary Poppins Bag bears the weight of my little world.