"Errand-Core" And The Rise of The High-Fashion Paper Bag

Yesterday, fashion-industry guests gathered on a blocked-off residential street in the Hancock Park neighborhood of Los Angeles for Balenciaga’s Fall 2024 show. When Kim Kardashian arrived with a paper Erewhon bag in hand, it seemed bizarre and comical — surely she could have left her shopping in the car for the big event. Then the presentation started and models made their way down the runway in groups, carrying takeaway lattes — and toting the same bags. Aside from the entire thing being peak L.A., it was celebrity “errand-core” at its finest.

Turns out Demna, the artistic director of Balenciaga, asked Kim to carry the overpriced grocery bag. “This is my purse for today; this is what Demna wanted me to carry, There are flowers in it. I’m going to give them to Demna later,” she said before the show. Considering that Bottega Veneta’s Pre-Spring 2024 campaign, which launched today, also features A$AP Rocky posing with a brown paper bag filled with flowers, we’re sensing a produce-themed shift across the fashion industry. Since when do we want to imagine grocery shopping with some of the richest celebrities wearing the most luxurious designer brands?

Fashion critic Rian Phin Tweeted earlier today about high-fashion brands now “depending on the semblance of reality.” “It’s a projection / a hologram of reality,” she wrote in the thread. “It’s like the paparazzi product placement of the mid 2000s where it-items, especially bags, were established through the paparazzi’s lens.” Bottega Veneta’s campaign was indeed shot paparazzi-style, with the brand licensing images from both Getty and Backgrid.

These two back-to-back errand-themed moments are also not the first of the fashion industry’s love affair with the brown paper bag. Bottega Veneta launched a $1.9k brown leather bag that looks just like paper earlier this year. And who can forget when Shia LaBeouf walked the red carpet with a brown paper bag with the words "I Am Not Famous Anymore" scribbled across the front in 2014?

Then and now, the humble paper bag is meant to convey relatability. Celebs, they’re just like us, right? Only their brown bags are raw leather with a a slap-in-the-face price tag, and even an Erewhon bag outside the context of a Balenciaga show is a sign of luxury, considering the going rate of the organic grocer’s bottled water and deer-antler serum. So, as with most things in the fashion industry, a brown bag full of flowers shouldn’t be confused for actual relatability — it’s an aesthetic to try on.

But for us “regular people,” it’s also commodifying a reflection of what we know. “Welcome to the algorithmic feedback loop,” New York creative director Frank Nesbitt wrote on Instagram Stories. “The brand is only the mirror. Look familiar? Of course. Nothing is more you than you." And if our errands can be packaged and sold — the way live — what does that make us?