You’re 18 on a small, bucolic liberal arts college campus. You leave your dorm to go to class, which is a two-minute walk away. What do you take with you? An enormous yellow backpack full not only of notebooks and pens but also… underwear.
Fast-forward: You’re 22, and you have an internship at a blog called Pitchfork. Because you are an intern, your job does not provide you with a computer. So what must you carry in a disgusting tote bag? Your huge laptop, which is from 2014 (it’s 2018). Your huge headphones (music blog). A packed lunch (deli turkey and bread). A book. Random garbage.
It will take you until age 27 to buy a purse. Before this, you will alternate between a backpack and a canvas bag, probably from Whole Foods. You will bring these items on Tinder dates with guys who have this really specific smell and also nine roommates. You will bring these items to fashion shows. You will have them with you when you get locked out of your apartment and need your Hasidic neighbor to teach you how to break back in. You will be in a mosh pit at a SOPHIE concert (RIP), and as you are slamming your body into a lanky 23-year-old, your Whole Foods bag will hit you really hard in the back. This is life as a lugger of stuff.
My first few years in New York City as a tiny pack mule involved wearing some of the craziest outfits and carrying some of the most hideous bags. I often performed such mental calculations as: Can I go to this magazine party carrying a purse that is a plastic bag I obtained as a reward for buying Vitamin Water? When I saw a woman with a small, tasteful purse, I would often wonder: Where do you put your spare jeans? I did not know it was possible to have a bag, and have it be nice, and have it be huge.
The turning point, for me, was an intervention. My friend Andy said, “For someone so chic, you carry the ugliest totes.” Another friend said, “What if you just got a really big purse?”
Bingo.
I am now something of a big purse evangelist. My bag of choice is the Puppets and Puppets plate bag from a few years ago, which can fit my copy of 2666 (roughly 900 pages), my wallet, my AirPods, and my makeup bag. I often wish it was bigger. Lately, I have been considering the Eckhaus Latta Bucket, with its supple lambskin and customizable strap. My friend Claudia recently said that the Eckhaus Bucket “looks like it’s from Express.” To which I say, that’s the point!
Also high on my list is the extremely shiny Model S from Auto, which looks like if a bag was a pair of shoes buffed by the train-station shoe shiner circa 1935. It is big enough that you can put your laptop in it, which is essential if you are me and sometimes feel called to the page. (Or if you want to watch Instagram reels but do not have the app on your phone.)
If I were ever lobotomized and woke up as a housewife, I would want a Marlo bag from The Row, which would be spacious enough to carry all of my Valium. I once was in a really gorgeous and expensive clothing store and watched a sort of dazed housewife type pick up a Marlo, look at it, ask the price, find out it was $5,000 and say, “Not bad.” And then ask her daughter, “What if mommy bought this purse?”
Here’s another thing I sort of covet: a gigantic, early 2000s Chloé bag, like if you could make a Paddington four times bigger.
I’m not alone in my love for a BBB. Former Vogue staff writer and current Substack queen Liana Satenstein is another such disciple. “I’ve tried to be a small bag girl. I’ve tried to be a medium bag girl,” she says. “But I always revert to the massive old-country schlepper pack-my-whole-life-in-there-even-if-I’m-leaving-for-an-hour. I don’t know if this is PTSD from my grandmother in 1917 Kyiv, and it gives me a hunch, but what are you going to do?”
Ditto my friend Vrinda Jagota, a former Pitchfork staffer who currently works as a freelance journalist and grassroots organizer. “I feel more comfortable with my laptop on me at all times,” Jagota says. “It is essentially an adult stuffed animal. Probably won’t be of much use to me at the natural wine bar, but in case I need to do an emergency edit of the Google doc titled ‘best and worst memories with [my ex from 2022],’ I can do that no problem. Also tax stuff for the months of March and April.”
That’s not to say the BBB doesn’t have its dissenters. Says the writer Natasha Stagg: “I do sometimes carry a big bag but in general would rather carry no bag at all.” She adds: “Nothing is ever exactly right because the right thing would be…nothing?” It’s true that even for us Elite Luggers, sometimes you just want to carry your wallet and keys and call it a day.
But the humble BBB can contain a whole universe if you want it to. It can be the ultimate “What’s in my bag?” kind of bag, if you’re dying to be approached for that kind of thing. Because the answer, of course, will be: everything. Everything is in my bag. Receipts are in my bag. Three unwrapped tampons are in my bag. A piece of garbage with high sentimental value is in my bag. Now that I’m older, I’ve embraced the BBB’s ability to help me feel prepared at all times for all situations. I have elegantly and unintentionally become my Jewish grandmother who was often concerned that if I did not pack a sweater and a light snack, I would perish.
Perhaps there’s an even simpler reason why the BBB is so alluring, why it feels like my own personal Noah’s Ark. When I reached out to the novelist Madeline Cash about this phenomenon, she sent back one sentence over text. “Maybe as we get older,” she wrote, “We have more to carry.”
