cute tote bags

John Galliano can be credited with giving the world the Saddle Bag in 1999, as part of Dior’s spring 2000 ready-to-wear collection. It was a handbag to mark a dawning age; how else were we expected to ride into the new millennium? Photos from the collection feature cut-up denim looks with thigh-high side slits and hardly any hemlines that fell straight. The style soon traveled outside the fantasy of the Galliano-verse and into the mainstream; Carrie Bradshaw carried the bag (it’s where she stashed her emergency cigarette during an unsuccessful nonsmoking stint), and so too did fixtures of the aughts like Simple Life costars Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie and The O.C.-era Mischa Barton. The bag’s defining feature was its shape, and Galliano had a ball swathing it in everything from an Oblique monogram colored in baby pink to Japanese-inspired floral embroideries. Soon after its introduction, the purse earned It bag status with recurring resurgences. In 2018, our craze for all things Y2K delivered a strong renaissance for the Saddle, and current Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri returned the style to the runway for her Americana patchwork collection that fall. Since then we’ve all been very much back in the saddle.
In 1989, Gianfranco Ferré began his appointment as creative director my bag for the house of Dior. One of his most lasting contributions to the brand is unquestionably the Lady Dior bag. As the story goes, in 1995, Bernadette Chirac, the wife of French president Jacques Chirac, rang up Dior with a request: She wanted the maison to craft a custom bag that would be gifted to Princess Diana on her visit to Paris. The resulting design was, appropriately, fit for a princess. It featured black quilted leather (a design inspired by the upholstery on the Napoleon III chairs Monsieur Dior used at his first shows) that wrapped an elegantly rectangular box. Like the posture required of such a lady, the bag didn’t and couldn’t slouch—and perhaps nodded to Monsieur Dior’s design philosophy: “I wanted my dresses to be constructed like buildings,” he once said. The Lady Dior bag was also crafted with a pair of demi-arched handles and yellow gold hardware. The prim purse was presented to Princess Diana at a Cézanne exhibition at the Grand Palais, and she wore it on subsequent visits to Birmingham, England, and Argentina. The bag was as beloved as the woman who inspired it, and it’s since become a permanent fixture within Dior’s handbag collection. As of late, the bag has been offered in small, medium, and large sizes fabricated—by hand—in supple calf leather, patent leather, Dior’s famed toile de Jouy, and other jazzier renditions and remixes.
In 1997 Bill Clinton began his second term, black bag NASA sent a rover to cruise around Mars, and Good Will Hunting was released. It was also the year that Fendi gave the world the Baguette, often considered the first-ever It bag. Created by Venturini Fendi, the bag—Fendi’s purse de résistance—was initially unpopular among the Fendi design team, which was hesitant to make such a statement with a handbag at a time when minimalism was the order of the day. Featuring a slight silhouette, a single strap, and a flap closure, it first appeared with a beige FF motif in a woolly textile and a removable strap constructed from a camellia-colored leather.The beauty of the Baguette is that it’s a blank canvas, designed to take on the mood of the current collection. (In an October 2000 episode of Sex and the City that cemented the accessory as a status symbol, Carrie Bradshaw’s Baguette—targeted by a petty thief—shimmers in grape juice–colored sequins.) Since its debut, thousands of variations of the Baguette have been introduced into the Fendi oeuvre. The bag is generally offered in three main sizes, a standard Baguette (27 cm long x 15 cm high), a Baguette mini (19 cm long x 11.5 cm high), and a Baguette multi (28 cm long x 17 cm high, with two straps), but its finishes vary season to season. The classic Zucca logo, moreover, has recently been remixed into cute tote bags a swirling monogram dubbed “FF Vertigo” in collaboration with artist Sarah Coleman. No matter which Baguette you go for, the choice is a delicious one.
Like the enduring allure of the woman it’s named after, The Jackie is a bag that will never go out of style. In 1961, Gucci introduced a Hobo-style bag that caught the eye of Jackie Kennedy, whose husband so famously loved Gucci’s loafer moccasins. It’s said that upon seeing a paparazzi image of Jackie Kennedy with the bag (then called the Fifties Constance), the Gucci family swiftly christened it the Jackie. The classic hobo-shape saw many iterations under Tom Ford and Frida Giannini, but its latest incarnation comes by way of Michele, who in 2021 gave us a spin on The Jackie with a bit more structure, an adjustable strap, and a piston closure. Back in 2014, Giannini made Kate Moss the star of the Jackie Bag campaign; now, Harry Styles is ushering in the bag’s new era.