An Ode to the Humble Shopping Bag

Leaving the store, Giordano and I resembled that Tumblr’d-to-death image of once-friends Winona Ryder and a cowboy hat-wearing Gwyneth Paltrow, galloping around SoHo in the late ’90s with their Tocca shopping bags on their arms. I felt a bit nostalgic, like I was living in a bygone era when I wasn’t mindlessly scrolling on resale platforms at 11pm or lazily clicking “express shipping”. And maybe that is because shopping in person feels like a bygone activity.

There’s a great article in the December 1996 issue of Vogue by Katherine Betts titled “Passion for Fashion”. The article is illustrated with women such as Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock, and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy toting along black Barneys New York shopping bags. In one image, a horde of shoppers with bags in the crooks of their arms gazed into a store window where the designer Giorgio Armani was styling Ashley Judd for all to see.

The article is a poetic rebuttal to a shopaholic doomsday piece by The New York Times that reported that women were over shopping. They were, allegedly, buying toasters instead of metallic Manolo Blahnik sandals. Quelle horreur!

To really see if shopping was donezo, Betts headed to New York City’s mammoth department stores and freshly opened mega boutiques and watched as women bought and consumed. The Times was wrong! Screw toasters: Ladies were crammed in Giorgio Armani’s freshly opened Madison Avenue like sardines. At Prada, hoards of chicks were sliding their credit cards across the counter. The most important accessory was a branded shopping bag on every arm.

The shopping scenes that Betts describes is an apocalyptic mess of chic. These women aren’t gatherers…these are hunters, trying to track down a perfect strappy Jimmy Choo heel or the latest Prada nylon backpack. But Betts detailed more than a shopping bender: She saw women out in the world not only shopping but also being out in the world.