It bags are ten a penny these days, but as ever the thrill of ownership always feels sweeter after a hard to get chase. Whole Foods, High Street Kensington’s finest purveyor of organic bulgur wheat, has been blessed with the answer to every cliché yummy mummy school run dream - an Anya Hindmarch Universal bag in its own understated paper-bag brown and green colour way. It is inevitably already on eBay for a cool £119.99.
At £10 it’s a snip, that is of course if your elbows are sharp enough to get hold of one. The bags, which go on sale today at all five Whole Foods across London at their stores in Clapham, Camden, Piccadilly and Stoke Newington, are strictly limited and sold one per customer.
This is the 15th iteration of Hindmarch’s latest bag project which has run the gamut of collaborations tying in with all from Selfridges to Waitrose and Sainsbury’s to Asda and the Co-op. Unsurprisingly a hierarchy of covetability has those gathered around London’s more salubrious school gates, less Tesco more Anya Mart purchasable from Hindmarch’s Pont Street store, or the biggest humblebrag reach, one of the Japanese or Hong Kong iterations, ideal for the expat in need of a soothing taste of homegrown status symbol.
The rise of the tote bag as fashion play has long been a signifier of cultural leanings and tribes - see the intellectual-aspirations of a Daunt Books, New Yorker or The Paris Review (chic) canvas variety.
Hindmarch’s comes with added eco-credentials, since its launch in 2021, the Universal Bag - made from 100 per cent recycled materials - has saved 230 tonnes of virgin plastic - just over the size of 19 double decker buses as a visual reference of what that might look like. Bags are promised to last for ten years, after which (or at any point in between) users can fold theirs back into its side pocket and post back to be recycled through its circular returns policy.
Hindmarch of course has form with the category, her groundbreaking 2007 “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” partnership with Antidote and the social change movement We Are What We Do via Sainsburys became a global phenomenon. It raised awareness of the issue to such a point that it resulted in the decision to charge for plastic bags in shops in this country. Hindmarch’s midas touch, ingenuity of design savvy and a proactive handle on creating for good has seen her come to occupy a unique space in the British fashion firmament. See you at the check out.
