The Backpack Is a Fashion Keyword Again. What Had to Happen First?

People have always needed to carry a backpack. It's just that most backpacks couldn't express the fashion needs of the person carrying them.

When was the last time you thought a backpack looked cool? Or have you never thought so at all?

If it's the latter, you may genuinely belong to the fashion-insensitive, because in the popular sense the backpack hasn't merely become fashionable — it has already set off several waves of trends in different styles. The first was probably Fjällräven, Sweden's national backpack, though some say it was Herschel, which Apple Stores even stock; MCM's logo prints and studs need no introduction. The clearest sign of this wave: almost every luxury brand with a bag line has now launched a backpack. Except Celine.

We use luxury brands as a weather vane not because they lead trends. Run by professional managers inside conglomerate structures, today's luxury houses behave more like big corporations; they still work hard at manufacturing social status, but they are far too removed from the instincts of the young. For them the backpack trend has already neared the top of the curve — otherwise why would everyone be in such a hurry?

Bring the subject up with the journalist Dana Thomas and she might quote what Prada's chief designer, Miuccia Prada, once told her in an interview: "No one wants a backpack, because it can't express 'luxury.'"

Many researchers of the fashion economy regard Thomas's book Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster as an insightful work, and Prada's 1984 nylon backpack really was a material innovation in fashion. But it seems to have come too early: it waited ten years to become a hit — an "It Bag."

Chantal Fernandez, a senior editor at the fashion site Fashionista, wrote in a post about backpacks that when she went out with the JanSport she had bought as a child, she felt she "wouldn't be taken seriously as an adult."

If you work in an office, you may have felt something similar. Once women shed the identity of "student," they can't wait to upgrade their gear, and a key part of that is trading the backpack they had always relied on for that legendary object called a "handbag." It's a coming-of-age ritual made of stuff. Men switch to more business-like backpacks; their choices here are often limited — Victorinox and TUMI, or even a bag from the same brand as the laptop, are common.

That spending continues. What's different is that from about 2014 the backpack came back into the field of vision of fashionable, trend-conscious people.

Google searches show it indirectly: whether you search for "backpack" in Chinese, or "Backpack," or "Fashion Backpack," you can see the curve rising.

On the other hand, retailers and brands have been pushing the trend too — Prada, Gucci and Louis Vuitton; M2malletier, Moschino, 3.1 Phillip Lim and Stella McCartney; Coach and Kate Spade, among others. "Backpacks are really trending right now," the designer Phillip Lim said. "Both the men's and the women's styles sell well; our stores are constantly out of stock."

We tried to untangle why the backpack came back. Fashion comes and goes unpredictably, as you know, but it always reflects some shift in culture and environment — and all of that changes how people spend.

MCM, the Trendmaker

MCM does not make elegant bags. They are covered in logo prints and studs, and they gleam with gold. Its popularity has nothing to do with elegance in the traditional sense; it is a byproduct of the Korean Wave.

MCM was once a German luxury brand, and it changed hands several times. After a Korean company bought it, a distinctive position and marketing plan won over a great many Asian consumers — sales in Asia now account for 60% of the total. We've written about this brand's history and development before; you can click here to read it.

At the end of 2010 MCM launched the logo-print Stark backpack, some versions studded or set with crystals. As with the spread of many fashion items, the "tipping point" for MCM's backpacks was celebrities. MCM worked with entertainment agencies to sponsor groups such as EXO and 2NE1, letting its logo and its look sink in on the back of their influence.

Korean dramas such as City Hunter and The Heirs were not to be missed either; product placement was the best route. You would see plenty of celebrities — TVXQ, Rihanna, even Cristiano Ronaldo — shot at airports carrying MCM backpacks, many of them logo styles. All of this tied the brand to the fans of those cultural products, and together with promotion by its ambassadors Rain and EXO, by mid-2013 MCM was one of the best-selling brands in Lotte Department Store.

But celebrity endorsement alone did not make MCM's backpacks work. Before MCM caught on, luxury brands rarely put much thought into backpacks, or didn't treat them as a fashion item at all — as Miuccia Prada said, a backpack can't express luxury. MCM filled exactly that gap in the market: people needed to carry backpacks; most of the backpacks on the market just couldn't express the fashion needs of the person carrying them.

With that reading of the market, MCM pushed the price of its backpacks up to 5,000 yuan. In the words of MCM Holdings chair Kim Sung-joo, that is "youthful luxury."

On the strategy behind MCM's backpacks, Kim Sung-joo said: "Many heritage European luxury brands have incredible craft and history, but they have become more and more boring and conservative — especially for Asian consumers, whose purchasing power is rising. In Asia, young office workers and professionals will be the main body of future customers. They have a different set of needs and a different view of luxury. That is where MCM has done the work, and where it has succeeded."

We interviewed a few MCM backpack buyers at random, and their answers were nearly identical. The Zhihu user Su Nannan said: "It's hard to think of another brand whose backpack can carry a laptop every day, is durable, and costs under 5,000 yuan... and isn't a laptop bag." Note that the 5,000-yuan line is arbitrary; the fuzzy range around it is what tells the story. For office workers a few years into their careers, without much purchasing power yet, 5,000 yuan may be a reasonable budget for a bag.

In 2015 MCM's sales grew about 14% year over year, reaching 700 million US dollars.

What Chased Away the "Student Look"?

Almost at the same time as MCM, another brand made the fashion world look again at what a backpack could do: Alexander Wang.

Alexander Wang, the cool young designer who moves through New York's socialite circles, launched the Marti backpack around 2011. Suzanna Pendlebury, a buyer at a British luxury site, said: "Ever since Alexander Wang put backpacks on the runway a few seasons ago (in 2013), the backpack trend has been reviving."

If you had to name what the MCM Stark and Alexander Wang's Marti share, it would be roughly this: leather, gender-neutral, a bit of rock in the mix, and still casual.

Casual matters, because in the trends of recent years casual means cool. That offhand kind of polish in particular has a fatal attraction for the young.

Some celebrity backpack fans helped push things along. Kristen Stewart, famous for playing Bella in Twilight, likes Fjällräven's Foldsack best, and has lately started carrying a Chanel graffiti backpack too.

The British model and actress Cara Delevingne is often photographed with backpacks as well — from Burberry, MCM, Chanel and Fendi, and of course the Mulberry backpack she helped design.

What all of them share is one innovation: a lot of leather. Leather replaced canvas and nylon and made the backpack look less cheap. That is easy to understand — good leather is one of the reasons nearly every luxury and designer brand dares to charge what it charges.

More to the point, leather also stretched the backpack's price range, from calfskin to python and crocodile, and gave more choices to people who used to find canvas and nylon bags beneath them. If you are a devotee of a brand like Porter, of course, you are the exception. For most people it is as Tomoko Ogura, senior fashion director at the upscale New York department store Barneys, put it: "Backpacks used to look more casual, but now fashion designers are using higher-end materials and injecting different styles, and these backpacks attract a different group of consumers."

Other grown-up design elements have cut down the backpack's "student look" too, making office workers readier to accept one. Leopard and zebra prints, for instance: later versions of the Prada Vela backpack used these animal patterns. Elements like these can dilute almost all of a backpack's adolescent air. Or take Chanel's quilted embossing, which gave the backpack some connection to "professional" and "feminine"; Rebecca Minkoff and Marc Jacobs used raised quilting on their backpacks as well.

Then there is metal. Take MCM: many of its backpacks use studs, crystals and rhinestones as decoration, which makes them look fairly hard-edged. Some Fendi bags use similar trim. Some brands carried their signature elements over to their backpacks — the hidden metal clasp and metal corner guards on Alexander Wang's Prisma, Stella McCartney's chains, Valentino's studs. All of it made the "high-end backpack" look like the real thing.

Shapes have multiplied too. Beyond the oval schoolbag and the triangular military rucksack, new shapes have appeared. They tend to be more feminine, for consumers who want a backpack without giving up femininity: the ladylike flap backpack (LV's Lockme, Everlane's backpacks), the rectangular backpack (Mulberry's Cara Delevingne line and Michael Kors's Romy), the bucket backpack (from The Row, the brand founded by the Olsen sisters, and from Chanel). You can probably see where this goes: they look more and more like handbags and shoulder bags.

The line between the backpack and the shoulder bag or clutch is in fact blurring. Some backpacks now have bigger handles and adjustable straps; others switch freely between a crossbody and a backpack, one bag for several uses. ZAC Zac Posen, MCM and Bottega Veneta have all released convertible styles.

"Backpacks are practical, though practical alone isn't enough now. It has to look good, catch the eye. Women want everything — they want the backpack to meet every need," said the designer Michael Kors. To attract as many buyers as it can, Michael Kors's site now shows 26 women's backpacks, covering designs from gender-neutral to feminine, plus 24 men's.

Athleisure's Rise Is Both a Cause and an Example

You cannot have missed athleisure. Sneakers go with anything now, and dressing too properly gets you mocked as a real-estate agent or an insurance salesman.

One explanation is that young people today want everyday accessories that are practical and comfortable. A backpack holds a lot and is comfortable to wear — that much is self-evident. It also works in many settings: a leather or nylon backpack can go to school, to the gym, on a business trip, even to the office, which matches athleisure's one-outfit-many-occasions logic exactly.

Tory Burch has said athleisure succeeds because it is "athletic and relaxed, while emphasizing functionality." The same holds for backpacks.

This generation of young people (China's post-80s and post-90s, millennials abroad) spends in a more self-directed way, putting more weight on pleasing itself while pursuing individuality as always.

Herschel is a Canadian brand that rose with athleisure, popular among young male office workers, though students carry it too. It presents nostalgic designs in a modern, plain way.

Jamie Cormack, one of the founders, described to GQ how they work backward from the end user: "We ask ourselves questions like, how will consumers use this product? Who will use it? What will they put in the backpack? What are they interested in?"

Between 2010 and 2011 its sales grew 900%, and the year after that the rate was still 350%. The brand put out so many colorways and patterns that it became the Converse of backpacks — widening its appeal without meaning to.

The athleisure brand most popular with women is Fjällräven's Kanken line. Its plain design and wide color range made it Sweden's national backpack; from there, social-media marketing by its British distributor, Lindsay MacFarlaine, plus fashion bloggers and celebrities picking it up, widened its reach further. In China's first- and second-tier cities this square, big-handled, affordable nylon bag is now everywhere. Besides students, plenty of young office workers carry it to work.

Herschel or Fjällräven — the non-luxury backpacks give off a kind of teenage innocence and ease without being too collegiate or stiff.

Backpack brands at every position in the market are in fact beyond counting. The multi-brand site Farfetch carries 604 men's and women's backpacks; Shophop has 257; Asos, at the low-to-middle end of fast fashion, has 642. You have surely heard the designer's story: "I could never find the backpack I wanted, so I made one myself." Building Block and a crowd of other small brands are the proof.

Like every trend, the backpack wave mixes streetwear, luxury houses and designer labels. Some had worked in obscurity for years and simply used the moment to widen their reputation; others rose with the wind and became the new trend.

In the Smartphone Era, No Bag Suits Us Better Than the Backpack

There is a story about the modern origins of the fashion bag. After the Industrial Revolution in Britain, travel by train spread widely. An industrialist noticed that his wife had trouble getting around with a suitcase and a purse for her coins. He wanted her bag to look different from the cloth bags used by the common classes, so he asked H.J. Cave & Sons to make her a larger, more upscale leather one.

The backpack's rise follows the same logic as the history of the handbag: it is tied to the development of modern transport. Now "on the road" has become an ordinary condition of city life — travel, business trips, even the daily commute. As cities spread out, office workers' commutes keep getting longer; a 2015 survey by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences found that the ordinary resident's commute runs more than 30 minutes. And people carry more with them than they used to.

"Wherever people are these days, life moves fast, so they are always looking for accessories that help them keep up with that pace," Michael Kors said. "The backpack is that kind of everyday accessory — it frees your hands, and it's comfortable."

Remember the joke about smartphones evolving an extra knuckle onto the human finger? With touchscreens, and with screens that keep getting bigger, free hands matter more and more to modern people who can hardly live without their phones. Big-screen phones keep gaining ground: in 2015 they were 20% of total smartphone shipments, and the share will reach about 33%.

You might say a messenger bag frees your hands just as well. True enough — but the point is that today's backpack, like every consumer product, is not the only way people can meet a given need. Consumption stopped being a zero-sum game long ago; new brands and new categories keep arriving and keep stoking the urge to buy, and consumers keep splitting into smaller groups as they look for themselves. One example at random: do you know why some people say the most fashionable way to use a backpack now is to carry it in your hand rather than on your back?

There is no standard answer. If we had to give one, we would have to open another subject: why even backpacks are getting smaller and smaller.

Cover image from Lyst, Herschel's official site, Prada's official site and others.