Issue 12: The Gayest Bag Ever
HANDBAGS AT DAWN // As the countdown to big brands going back to their rainbow-free logos comes to a grand finale, I want to revisit the most LGBTQIA+ piece of luggage that ever was...
Handbags at Dawn (@h4ndbagsatdawn) is a fortnightly newsletter that lands into your inbox every other Thursday, around lunchtime.
It’s September 2013 and really late at night, but I’m 20 which means that staying up until the early hours of the morning doesn’t affect my daily functions. It also means I’m financially incapacitated and the fear of going bald is nothing but a rarely occurring nightmare. Living the life with the vigour of someone who doesn’t think about saving up for a property, I’m instead more interested in having every single colourway of *that* H&M henley shirt with cuffable sleeves. After adding a couple more of these tees to the collection and bringing its count up to 16, I had just returned from my first ever London Fashion Week trip that I self-funded thanks to my dance scholarship money and the fact that my aunt lived in London.
With a letter from my very junior, very part-time job at ELLE Croatia, I had applied for show tickets as the official fashion representative of the burgeoning Eastern European market (lol). In addition to access to shows of brands that don’t exist anymore, I somehow scored a standing ticket for Burberry where I spotted Cara Delevingne, Sienna Miller and Alexa Chung before almost peeing myself while wearing an H&M top hat. God, this really was my Hennes and Mauritz era. But there I was back in my bedroom, probably around 3am, passionately scrolling through Style.com (RIP) and indulging my eyes with all the London collections I desperately wanted to see IRL but couldn’t get a ticket for. Meadham Kirchhoff, Christopher Kane, Marques’Almeida and, of course, my favourite designer at the time – Ashish. His maximimalist take on all sequinned everything showed a way to fashion that was fun and unapologetically camp, even when I didn’t fully understand the repercussions of ‘being camp’.
Feasting my eyes on Ashish Gupta’s latest collection, for Spring 2014, it looked like all of my iPhone 4 pop art screensavers came to life with references of peak capitalism mixed with adventurous experiences of going into one of London’s many off-license shops. These references, as always with Ashish, were colourful and bold; completely explicit and subversive in their chaos. And there they were, these sparkly objects of desire that raised my heart rate like Ekin-Su and Davide do for each other. They were carrier bags, but they also weren’t. Structured rumples of sequinned fabric that were clearly meant to look like one thing, but in fact were something totally different. The M&S plastic bag I proudly brought back from my London trip as a souvenir (yes, I used to bring shopping bags home and keep them in wooden boxes as memories to my travels) was now showered in small pieces of glitter and spelling out S&M. The other one, a clear reference to the Tesco bag, had ‘DISCO’ splashed across it. My mind was blown – it was the kind of adrenaline I rarely experience today, especially within the fashion realm. I didn’t know how, where or why, but I knew I needed to have one of these bags. In that moment, I also decided that ‘DISCO’ is my favourite word in the English language.
Not to be too earnest in a place that’s mostly just an amalgamation of empty thoughts and bag-related musings, but today is the last day of Pride Month so fuck it. When thinking back to all of those fashion references I fervidly consumed in my earlier years, the Ashish SS14 collection being a prime example, I can’t help but feel like my love of garish creativity was a way of expressing my true self without acting upon my sexuality. Even though there was nothing outwardly (homo)sexual about them and I couldn’t explain why, these sparkly bags, retrospectively, felt like the queerest objects in the world to me and I adored them exactly for that reason. Exploring every corner and trying to understand their origin stories in my own space and time pushed my internalised homophobia to take a back seat, even for just a few moments. With my coming out still years away, seeing these bags was probably the first time I fully understood why being gay can be so much fun – whatever that word means to you
Fast-forward seven years to February 2020 and I’m now an openly gay man in a happy gay relationship of almost three years with a lovely gay man. Did I mention I was a fag? I still had no real prospect of buying a property, but at least I had someone to dream of owning a house with. And it was Valentine’s Day, a holiday neither me or my lovely gay man Ryan ever celebrated or believed in. But there he was, handing me a large box while dressed in his PJs. Somewhat perplexed by this move, I swapped him for a card I bought only a couple hours earlier, purely because I knew how much he liked cards. He is British, after all… The box was brown and unwrapped; fairly light and made a rustling noise when shaken. After sourcing a pair of blunt scissors from underneath the sink, I excitedly opened it up as my jaw instantly dropped. The Ashish Tesco-Disco shopping bag was there in all its glistening glory, though it had been completely sold out for years. I hadn’t seen it on Vestiaire or eBay despite continually searching for it. And this one wasn’t used either – it was new and wrapped in a thin plastic packaging. “I asked Ashish to make one for you,” Ryan said with a big, proud grin on his face. I had no intention of finding out how, why, where or how much it cost, because it didn’t matter. My gay boyfriend gave me the gayest bag ever. This is the Oxford dictionary definition of Gaylentine’s.
Though I don’t think my bag collection will ever be complete, this bag is one of those items that will forever stay at its pinnacle. Owning it feels like a success in itself, and just knowing it was a gift from the first man I fell in love with makes it so much more special. Every time I look at this bag or take it down to my local fruit & veg shop to buy some poppers, I’m reminded of how fucking amazing it feels to not only observe queerness from afar but also live through it daily. Honestly, this is exactly what the Stonewall riots fought for – for sequinned DISCO bags filled poppers and long-term gay relationships filled with generous gifts. xxxx
*PEEK OF THE WEEK*
I don’t want to be a pinkwashing corp who only spotlights successful queer people in June, but it just happens to be that I recently asked one incredibly successful queer person to share what’s in their purse and they generously agreed. So, it would be unfair to keep their bag’s contents a secret from you, right? It feels particularly poignant that this week’s guest star is Tom Rasmussen (@tomglitter), a writer, performer, author, Vogue columnist, Florence Welch BFF and musician extraordinaire whose 2am set was one of the highlights of my prime Glastonbury experience. They have released two ridiculously insightful-yet-funny books already, and Tom’s take on marriage was one of the main reasons why I stopped harassing Ryan to say yes to the dress. But what does a working, multifaceted artist like them need on a daily basis? Here’s a look into Tom’s Balenciaga mini tote…
What does the inside of your bag say about you?
Tom: “Ciggies, lighter, keys, charger, gum and stop smoking pills… Truly a contradiction. It’s about trying hard, and failing chicly.”