I’d like to have a word with the woman who bought a burgundy tote in 1994 because a magazine called it “the season’s answer to black,” and then discovered the season had approximately one honest answer to black, and it was still black. That bag lasted four months and one very disappointing rainstorm. I mention this only because I bought another one this year, decades later, apparently having learned nothing except how to spell burgundy correctly.
A woman on the light rail asked me where mine was from, then said, “it’s more brown than I expected,” and walked off before I could argue with her, which was probably for the best because she was right. That is the entire story of buying this bag online. The product photo, lit like it’s auditioning for a wine label, shows something deep and almost purple.
It arrives, and in actual Denver daylight, it reads more like a very confident brown that got ambitious. I’ve owned three of these now across three different retailers, and only one of them held the color it promised. The other two settled into something I’d call “burgundy adjacent,” which is fine, but not what I paid for.
What it holds is where the real argument lives, because half the appeal of a tote is pretending you’re the kind of person who carries one elegant item, and the other half of you is stuffing it with a phone, keys, sunglasses case, a granola bar for emergencies that never actually qualify as emergencies, and, on one memorable Tuesday, an entire cardigan I’d taken off and refused to carry separately.
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The good one fit all of that without looking like I was moving apartments. The cheap one, bought in a moment of weakness, developed a slouch by week three that made it look like it was apologizing for something.
My sister saw the good one on the kitchen counter and just picked it up, turned it over once, and put it back down without comment, which from her is close to a standing ovation.
Shoe pairing turned out to be simpler than I expected and also the one place I’ll admit this bag is a gamble. It wants a black boot or a cognac loafer, something with its own opinion, because anything wishy washy just disappears next to it and you end up looking like you accidentally grabbed the wrong bag on your way out. Pair it wrong and it reads like a costume for a job interview at a winery.
I called the whole category a nineties rerun within about ten seconds of seeing this year’s version, which might say more about how long I’ve been paying attention than about the bag itself. Either way, mine’s still on the counter, holding a cardigan it never signed up for, doing exactly what I bought it to do.
