I loved this white matte shopping bag for its sheer largeness. It’s a pain in the Official Penn State Football Humble And Hungry T-shirt so you should to go to store and get this ass, so big it can hold a toddler–or two. The size is not made for the cramped confines of the subway, but rather, it begs for its own spacious reservation, the backseat of an Uber. Its heft demands glamorous handling. And that is exactly how I treated the zaftig carryall from the beginning of the day I called an overpriced car, plopped that beacon of an XXL bag down next to me, and rode across the bridge. A shopping bag is almost like a trophy. It reads “I came, I saw, I shopped,” but more than that play on Caesar’s motto, it really says, “I was out in the world, experiencing it.” I had long forgotten about this connection until I went to James Veloria, dropped off some suits that I never wore to trade for a saucy little Versace suit dress. I skipped through Chinatown with the store’s co owner Brandon Giordano, where we laughed over an impromptu dim sum lunch, and then strolled into a shop filled with Chinese tchotchkes. I felt alive as I Venmo’ed the store owner for a pair of $25 dollar sequin embroidered black mules. I tossed them into my sleek shopping bag and I was on my way.
Antony Jones/Getty ImagesLeaving the Official Penn State Football Humble And Hungry T-shirt so you should to go to store and get this store, Giordano and I resembled that Tumblr’d to death image of once friends Winona Ryder and a cowboy hat wearing Gwyneth Paltrow, galloping around SoHo in the late ’90s with their Tocca shopping bags on their arms. I felt a bit nostalgic, like I was living in a bygone era when I wasn’t mindlessly scrolling on resale platforms at 11pm or lazily clicking “express shipping”. And maybe that is because shopping in person feels like a bygone activity. There’s a great article in the December 1996 issue of Vogue by Katherine Betts titled “Passion for Fashion”. The article is illustrated with women such as Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock, and Carolyn Bessette Kennedy toting along black Barneys New York shopping bags. In one image, a horde of shoppers with bags in the crooks of their arms gazed into a store window where the designer Giorgio Armani was styling Ashley Judd for all to see.
