One of us has spent $340 on a brown backpack and defends every dollar of it like she’s in front of a jury. Another has one from a drugstore adjacent website that cost $28 and has outlasted three of my more expensive bags, and neither of them is backing down. This is the actual state of the brown backpack conversation on our team, an ongoing fight with no resolution, and honestly I think that’s correct, because the category itself is split down the middle the same way.
The expensive one gets defended on the grounds that the leather has gone soft and dark in exactly the places a bag touches your body, the strap edge, the bottom corner, and four years in it looks better than the day she bought it, which is a real argument, I’m not dismissing it. The cheap one gets defended on the grounds that it survived a rained out tailgate, a spilled thermos of coffee, and got left on a Charlotte sidewalk overnight after a client dinner ran long, and was still sitting there in the morning looking exactly as unbothered as before. Both of these are true and both of these women think the other one is wrong, and I’ve stopped trying to referee it.
What nobody disagrees on is the bottom of the bag. You will lose your keys in a brown backpack the way you lose them nowhere else. Black bags at least have the decency to be simple pits, you dig, you find them.
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A brown backpack, especially the ones with a canvas or suede feeling lining, seems to actively camouflage anything metal, and I have stood on a client’s doorstep patting around inside mine for a solid forty five seconds while she watched, which is not the impression a stylist wants to make.
On color, I’ll say this plainly because I don’t think it gets said enough. Brown does more work with black than people give it credit for, it reads intentional instead of like you ran out of options, and it does something similarly good against navy, softer than the black on black combination everyone defaults to. Against a bright color, an orange coat, a cobalt dress, it’s the pairing that either looks like the smartest thing in the room or like you accidentally grabbed the wrong bag on your way out, and I genuinely can’t tell you which one you’ll get, it depends entirely on the brown and the shade of bright, which is not a satisfying answer but it’s the honest one.
The gamble pick here is a structured brown backpack with a top handle that looks incredible on someone with a very put together, tailored wardrobe and slightly like you’re headed to a conference on someone who isn’t. I like it. I wouldn’t tell everyone to buy it. Buy the one that matches the bag you’re already living in, not the one in the photo.
