Out to Lunch: Paper Bags Go Luxury

Louis Vuitton’s A/W 24 menswear show (Pharrell’s second as creative director) included a surprising and divisive accessory: leather fold-over pouches shaped like brown paper sandwich bags.

This follows in the footsteps of other luxury brands like Bottega Veneta, whose recent campaign (shot paparazzi style) features rapper A$AP Rocky carrying a leather ‘paper’ bag, while at Balenciaga’s A/W 24 show, both models and celebrity guests alike carried paper bags from LA’s organic market Erewhon. And it’s not a new trend – back in 2012, Jil Sander released a coated brown paper bag that now goes for almost twice its original price on resale sites.

In fact, food carriers are a bit of a hot topic. At mass market level, US restaurant chains Panera Bread and KFC both released handbags designed to house their sandwiches which subsequently became fashion must-haves, while totes from American grocery chain Trader Joe’s have reached cult item status.

These extreme high/low pieces are purposefully polarising. Trompe-l’oeil bootleg-adjacent handbags are already extremely popular amongst influencers, and Vuitton’s lunchboxes echo Balenciaga’s Ikea and Lay’s bags, which revel in the fact that these seemingly everyday objects are not as they seem. Carrying a grocery or lunch bag is a universal, decidedly unluxurious experience – but how many can say theirs cost $3,000?

As explored in Luxury Fashion’s Cultural Pivot, brands are increasingly employing kitsch and novelty – including via food x fashion collaborations – to generate buzz and spark an irreverent ‘if you know, you know’ moment amongst fashion fans. Whether it’s an IRL (in real life) conversation piece or simply ‘wearable content’, the shock factor sells.