In Defense of the Novelty Purse

My bag is a strawberry. It is shaped like a strawberry, it is the size of a strawberry, and it holds a phone, a card, and one (1) lip product if I am strategic about it. It is not practical. That is not the assignment.

Here is what happened the last time I wore it: a woman at the crosswalk said “okay, the bag.” The guy making my cortadito asked where it was from. A kid pointed. Three interactions with strangers in twenty minutes, all of them good, in a city where most of us go days without one.

The math nobody does

We evaluate bags on capacity, and capacity is genuinely useful for the tote you carry to work. But most of us own the work tote already. The second bag — the dinner bag, the walking-around-on-Saturday bag — is not competing on capacity. It is competing on whether it makes you happy to look down at it.

On that metric the strawberry beats a very nice, very tasteful, very expensive black rectangle every single time. And the strawberry cost forty dollars.

The rule that keeps it from being a costume

One loud thing. That is it. If the bag is a strawberry, the outfit is quiet: a white collared top, a solid skirt, done. The novelty bag is the joke and the rest of the outfit is the straight man. Put the strawberry with a printed dress and neon shoes and you have crossed from “personal style” into “theme.”

The corollary: novelty bags are not a category to build a wardrobe around, they are a category to own two of. Get the one that makes you laugh. Wear it constantly. Retire it when it stops working.

Where to actually find them

Thrift and vintage first, always — novelty bags are exactly the thing people buy once, use twice, and donate, which means the rack is full of them and nobody else is looking. After that, small makers on Instagram, and the accessory wall at the shops where nothing costs more than fifty dollars.

What I would skip: the very expensive designer version of the joke. If the fruit costs eight hundred dollars, the joke is on you, and it is not as funny.