The Tote Was Never Built to Hold Its Shape

On Korean style feeds this month, the small bag is losing ground. Shoulder bags and totes roomy enough to free both hands are turning up across the accounts that set the pace after each runway season, looser and heavier than the structured totes carried a decade ago. The shape getting attention has a name older than the trend wearing it.

Tote entered English as a verb meaning to carry, first recorded in Virginia in the 1670s. Its deeper origin is still unsettled; the Oxford English Dictionary has rejected the once popular claim that it descended from West African words for carrying or piling up. The compound tote bag did not appear until around 1900, and it described a plain carryall, not a fashion object.

The bag that made the word famous arrived later. L.L. Bean built its Ice Carrier in 1944 to haul block ice home from the distributor without splitting at the seams: heavy cotton canvas, double stitched, no interior frame, handles tested to hold 500 pounds. It disappeared from the catalog after one season, then returned two decades later, in 1965, as the Boat and Tote, still sewn the same way in Maine today.

A shoulder bag descends from a different lineage: the clasp frame purses and kiss locks that structured women's handbags from the 1920s into the 1940s, built to hold their shape whether full or empty.

Fall's oversized bags are often described as slouching, following the body instead of standing apart from it. That is not a new engineering feat. A frame free canvas or leather bag has nothing inside to resist gravity at any size; the slouch was always the tote's default, just scaled up now that the silhouette is back in view.

Sources: L.L. Bean · Online Etymology Dictionary