This season’s It bag? The subtle yet surprisingly spacious half-moon
The It bag of the season doesn’t have a designer label or a logo. (You can invest in a swanky version if you really want to, but the most popular version can be picked up for less than £15.) The bag of the season doesn’t even have a name; it has a shape – the half moon. I’ve heard people talk about the lemon-slice bag (which sounds pleasingly cocktailhour-ish) or the croissant bag (the spirit of the Fendi Baguette lives on) but half moon makes the most sense, because that is all there is to this bag, really – just a graphic outline, like the moon seen from Earth.You have already seen this bag everywhere, by the way. In fact you may well have one. The Uniqlo version has been a TikTok sensation. Costing £14.90 in a pick’n’mix of colours, it is made of nylon, soft but sturdy, a minimal but pleasing half moon. The strap is seatbelt-wide and thick, so it doesn’t dig into your shoulder, and it’s adjustable, so you can choose where you want the weight of the bag to sit, whether that’s snug under your arm or against your hip.
This bag is an ingenious Mary Poppins-esque size too, in that it looks neat and minimal but holds a surprising amount.
I became quite transfixed over the summer with TikToks of teenage girls showing how they could fit everything they needed for a day at the beach or a festival into one. My favourite was the girl who was carrying a hardback novel and a family-size packet of jaffa cakes in hers, as well as her makeup, phone, keys and sunglasses.
New this season is an autumnal corduroy version, also by Uniqlo, very nice in brown or olive shades, and still only £14.90.
The funny thing is, you can see the half-moon bag everywhere without really ever noticing it. Its shape means the bag snuggles into the body – secure and discreet under your arm – or clings to you like a babe in arms if you wear it across your body. It is the most unobtrusive of bags.
Do you remember the time when It bags were heavy with hardware, barnacled with locks and overgrown with charms, so the only way to carry them was to brandish them aloft, like a shield? Well, this is sort of the opposite. The It bag for the year of quiet luxury.We talk a lot about whether shoes are comfortable or not, but not nearly enough about whether bags are. And yet when you carry a bag all day, it can be as excruciating as a too-high heel, digging into your shoulder, or tilting you lopsided.
The secret sauce of the half-moon bag is that it is the most ergonomic shape to carry over your shoulder. I was strictly cross-body for years, but the half-moon bag has reconverted me. (Side note: never underestimate the difference changing a strap length can make. I have almost never had a bag with a buckled strap that I haven’t taken to a cobbler to have an extra hole added, to make it longer or shorter. Doing this can make the difference between back pain and no back pain which, as many of us know, is everything.)The half-moon bag is not a new idea. The Gucci Jackie bag, every bit as hot now as it was during the 1960s, is a half moon. The Row’s most iconic style, and the last word in half-moon chic for those who have a space-race budget – I’m not even going to put the actual figures here – is an asymmetric half moon.
And you can’t move for them on the high street: Charles & Keith has a whole range of half-moon bags, called Petra, for £85 a pop. Arket has a chic black leather version for £149, while M&S sells a perfectly simple day version in black or brown faux leather for £25 – and a crystal-encrusted party version (pictured here), for £29.50.So shoot for the moon. With this bag you are halfway there already.
Model: Sherin at Body London. Hair and makeup: Sophie Higginson using Living Proof and The Ordinary. Stylist’s assistant: Sam Deaman. Bag: Marks & Spencer. Jacket: Zara
The opposite of bags heavy with locks and charms, this is one for the year of quiet luxury
saging is quickly becoming table stakes for retailers that cater to next-gen consumers.”
However, similar to the way in which wearing a Renaissance tour Tshirt or carrying a tote bag with the name of your favourite deli signifies not only your love of Beyoncé and bagels but also your cultural capital, there is an argument that mental health merchandise denotes much more than your emotional state. In the same way therapy speak has become part of the daily lexicon, is it reductive to those who have a genuine anxiety disorder?
Tang argues that while slogan clothing may encourage conversation, it may still not leave wearers equipped with the ability to handle deeper conversation around it. She also sees problems with defining oneself via one’s mental wellbeing. “A mental health issue is a diagnosis and series of symptoms,” Tang says. “It is not your identity.”
Tang also notes concerns with people wearing mental health merchandise for “secondary gains”, saying: “The primary gain of disclosing a medical condition or illness is for treatment. The secondary gain is the attention that comes from it. It’s the ‘Are you OK?’ from strangers.”
Fashion and mental health have a problematic past. In 2001, Alexander McQueen set his show in a space that seemed to mimic a padded cell. (Vogue described it as: “Demented girls, wearing hospital headbands and everything from extraordinary mussel-shell skirts to impossibly chic pearl-coloured cocktail dresses, slithered and strutted while uselessly attempting to fly over the cuckoo’s nest.”) Six years later, Vogue Italia featured a shoot by Steven Meisel entitled “Super Mods Enter Rehab”, which included the model Lara Stone being dragged by nurses down a hospital corridor and locked up in cells.
In 2019, the Gucci show opened with a series of models walking on a conveyor belt wearing what appeared to be a fashion take on straitjackets. In an unplanned protest, one of the models, Ayesha Tan-Jones, held up their hands, on which they had scrawled the words “mental health is not fashion”. Afterwards, they posted a statement to Instagram: “Presenting these struggles as props for selling clothes in today’s capitalist climate is vulgar, unimaginative and offensive to the millions of people around the world affected by these issues.”
So, is the commodification of mental health reductive? Russell says she wouldn’t be “terribly surprised” if customers were buying medical themed merchandise without actually experiencing the conditions. “But,” she says, “no one is going to go to their doctor and say: ‘I want this medication because I saw it on a T-shirt’.”
To read the complete version of this newsletter – complete with this week’s trending topics in The Measure and your wardrobe dilemmas solved – subscribe to receive Fashion Statement in your inbox every Thursday.