When I carry my smallest bag, a vintage Yves Saint Laurent patent leather black pouch, I feel free. I am light as a feather. I’ve shed about 50 spiritual pounds. There’s a lot of talk these days about living in the moment—well, hell, with my tiny bag, I am living between seconds. I’m in cosmic carry-all zen, skipping and smiling! I am a woman bound by nothing except for: a stick of gum (stunted Orbit), my phone (caseless!), and lip gloss (Dior Addict Lip Tint). I don’t have responsibilities (no laptop). My small child is not hijacking my amygdala. I am oddly more organized, with my card-case-size bag. I have transformed into the no-worries Gisele Bündchen of Park Slope, who only carries a credit card and two keys.
This whole carrying zilch thing is a shock to my system. Typically, I haul zaftig bags, stuffed to the brim with cords, packed with things like a religious book, a sexy book, and a notebook. My hauling traditions are genetic: Even if I whip out a giant, butter-leather TWP bag that’s wildly chic, it’s as if I’ve morphed into my great-grandmother, hobbling around the Pale of Settlement, shilling schmattas and stuffing disintegrating potatoes into a black hole of a burlap sack. My bags are big, buoyant, and heavy, and probably the reason my thoracic spine is tilted like the Tower of Pisa.
But the fall 2026 runway tells me otherwise. At Saint Laurent, models carried splinter-thin bags that resembled wallets. The idea of strutting around with only three dollars feels so laissez-faire and devil-may-care. Where are these glamazon characters going, holding absolutely nothing? Well, wherever it was, I wanted to go. Maybe if I lost my hulking bag as big as a carry-on, I could lose my worries, too!
After all, small bags have long been a thing. In the Metropolitan Museum of Art database, you’ll find colorful, print-forward itty-bitty bags from Peru’s ancient Nasca community, fashioned out of camelid hair and used to hold coca leaves. Fast forward to the late 1700s: women would tote around petite glam pouches christened reticules until the 1820s (these would be rehashed almost a century later). Jump to the 2010s, when there was an explosion of pint-sized bags thanks to the microscopically small Jacquemus top-handle purse titled the “Chiquito,” aka “little one” in Spanish. Well, this “little one” set off a very large domino effect in the creation of fetal purses.
In the depths of my heart, perhaps I am a small bag girl. All is kumbaya with a lilliputian slot of a space, barely enough room for a pinky-sized lipliner and a stray penny. When I walk around with my palm of a YSL pouch, it’s as if I am free from the suffocation of things and, well, tomorrow.
Saint Laurent
