Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

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Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

The handbag will never die. The need to carry things is deeply human

The bag isn’t fashion. It isn’t just function either. It is about how gender roles have evolved across cultures, and how much of women’s work has been organised around remembering, preparing and carrying.

Few everyday objects attract as much interpretation as the women’s handbag. It is a place to put things, but also a way of reading the person who carries them. There is so much to store in them, and so much to say about what that storage means.

At the end of May, The New York Times gave that old fascination a new provocation: Is the women’s handbag over?

Vanessa Friedman’s piece ‘Is the Handbag Over?’ did not quite write the handbag’s obituary. Fashion, she argued, rarely works that neatly. But she did point to a shift. According to Lyst data cited in the column, demand for women’s handbags was down 5.5 per cent in April 2026 compared with April 2025. Searches for briefcases were up 14 per cent, and searches for clothes with pockets rose 542 per cent between January and April. Friedman’s conclusion was not that the bag had disappeared. It was that the old ‘era of dominance’ may be ending.

Two decades after Sex and the City turned Carrie Bradshaw’s shoes and bags into aspiration, the same collection suddenly looks like excess. The question is no longer only which bag a woman wants. It is whether she should have to carry one at all.

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Hunters versus gatherers

Author Ursula K Le Guin gives the handbag debate a frame larger than fashion. In ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, she writes against the old heroic story of the hunter: The spear, the weapon, the conquest. Instead, she asks us to look at the gatherer’s object: The bag, basket, sling or net that allows people to collect food, bring it home and keep life going. Le Guin was not writing about handbags. She was asking why cultures glorify the tool that wounds and overlook the container that sustains. The hunter becomes myth. The gatherer becomes background. It creates a gendered politics of carrying.

The bag belongs to the work most easily made invisible: Preparation, care, maintenance, getting through the day. So the current fashion debate cannot only be about whether a status accessory has lost its shine. It is also about who is expected to carry, and who gets to move through the world unencumbered.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin made the gendered part of this argument bluntly in the 1983 New York........

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