For The Love Of The Mary Poppins Bag

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…