Anti-status, status bag

DON’T we love life’s sweetest and sharpest irony? The ultimate status bag circulating in highest society remains the Birkin by Hermes, which once had a waiting list of three years. Yes of course the Together Bag is a blatant, shameless knock-off that takes one second for any designer bag owner to realise this is not the real thing. The increasingly-famous Together Bag. True, the Together Bag has the Birkin printed on both sides, sideways and even on the bottom but it is only a carry-all. Many are titillated by the combination of humour on a banal shopping bag that has reduced the world’s most exclusive and expensive bag into a cheeky carry-all. The fashion world is agog with the blurring of boundary between elitism and democracy. After all, the great and frightfully exalted Karl Lagerfeld, creative director for Chanel, has done a collection for ultra-mass market Macy’s and even had the audacity to declare “it is my duty to do a line for Macy’s”. Ditto for Lanvin and Jimmy Choo, which have also done a capsule collection for department store H&M. Popular as it is, H&M is still a chain store for the heaving masses. Bizarrely the Together bag is a hit among the rich and famous who already have designer bags by the shelf-full. However decadent and depraved, chances are you will not use your Hermes Birkin to carry your groceries, soiled gym clothes, dirty laundry, heavy books or bits and pieces that you accumulate in the course of a day. Most will use a cotton tote or, worse, plastic bags as leather ones can stretch and lose their shape when over-loaded. This was what happened to Thursday Friday’s founders Roni Brunn and Olena Sholomytska who, like most of us, would not dream of stuffing heavy, wet or rough-edged objects into their pricey bag. In an email interview, Roni Brunn explains: “Olena and I met in Stockholm. I was running the Indie pop band From and she was an IT consultant. We hit it off and decided to be business partners as we shared similar tastes and ideas.”