Remember the “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” Tote? Here’s the 30-Year Story of the Woman Behind It

Anya Hindmarch calls herself a “Thatcher’s girl.” She has also done very well out of social media.

Anya Hindmarch never expected a £5 tote printed with “I’m NOT A Plastic Bag!” to set off that kind of frenzy. In Britain, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taiwan — queues formed outside the shops selling it, supermarkets included, and resale prices on eBay climbed as high as $400.

“The bag launched in Tokyo at 11 the next morning, but the night before, when I drove past [the Tokyo flagship] after dinner, people were already lining up,” Hindmarch recalled. In Hong Kong and Taiwan the crowds turned unruly enough to send people to hospital.

The British designer label Anya Hindmarch made the bag in 2007 with the nonprofit group We Are What We Do: a fashion statement meant to raise environmental awareness and get people to use fewer plastic bags, in a run limited to 20,000. Boycotting plastic bags was becoming a global green cause at the time.

Before it went on sale in Britain that March, the bag had already been handed to stars in the gift bags at Vanity Fair’s Oscar-night party, and it turned up soon after in street photographs of Keira Knightley, Lily Allen and others.

It is widely counted as a brilliant piece of marketing. That canvas bag is how ordinary people outside fashion’s small circle first learned the name Anya Hindmarch.

In the Social Media Era, Anya Hindmarch Became a Winner of Influencer Culture

Anya Hindmarch recently held a “Build a Bag” event at Lane Crawford in Shanghai, selling a customizable tote exclusively there. She sums up her eponymous brand in three words: “craftsmanship, personalization, humor.” Take “Build a Bag”: you start with a plain tote in fine leather and finish it by swapping in straps of different lengths and clipping on small charms — a fried egg, an eyeball. A full set costs about 10,000 yuan.

Anya Hindmarch has more than 50 shops worldwide, including flagships in London, New York, Los Angeles and Tokyo, plus department-store counters and multi-brand boutiques. Five of them have customization workshops that can handle almost any request. “Be a Bag,” launched in 2001, let customers print photographs on their bags and proved popular; a sticker line launched in 2015 for “light customization” sold $18 million worth (about 110 million yuan) in two seasons.

“I’m obsessed with personalization. A friend of mine always wears a watch tied on with a ribbon — it was her father’s watch, but it has her own style to it. Something beautiful and rigorously made can also feel easy, and that’s a perfect example. I like combining absolute quality with a bit of irreverent design. That’s what makes our products different, and it’s what our customers come here looking for,” Hindmarch told QDaily.

Her rise was not quick. By the time of the eco-bag craze in 2007, the handbag and accessories label was 20 years old, and its customers had included Princess Diana, the Australian supermodel Elle Macpherson, European princesses and Emma Watson. But most shoppers had no idea who Anya Hindmarch was; she was still a luxury name inside fashion’s small circle.

She has always been good at borrowing the glow of famous people. Before the internet, that opened the upper-class market to her. As the celebrity effect kept compounding in the social media era, the brand shot up over the past few years and became a winner of the influencer age.

In 2014, a video surfaced online of Beyoncé’s sister Solange Knowles attacking Jay Z in a lift while swinging an Anya Hindmarch “crisp packet” clutch, and Hindmarch promptly turned the gossip into an ad. In 2016, Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid posted an Instagram photograph wearing Anya Hindmarch’s big-eyed backpack, and the bag became a hit overnight.

Exactly the way the 2007 eco-bag became fashion’s must-have.

She Quit School at 19 to Start a Business, and Her Handbag Brand Caught Princess Diana’s Eye

Asked why she started, Anya Hindmarch always tells the same story: at 16 she was given an old Gucci bag by her mother, and in that moment she knew what she wanted to do. “I still remember how it made me feel. A woman plays many roles in her life, and bags help fill out those roles. They can lift your mood,” she told QDaily. “I became obsessed with leather and learned every skill that goes with it. That hasn’t changed.”

In 1987, living in Italy at 19, she noticed that every stylish woman in Florence carried a leather bag with thin drawstrings. She went back to Britain, went to Harpers & Queen magazine, talked the editors into running a bag of her own design — much like the Florentine one — as a reader-exclusive item, and found an Italian factory to make it. Her first attempt sold 500 bags, and she used the £7,000 profit to start her own company.

Early on she ran into what every designer label runs into. “You couldn’t meet the factories’ minimum orders, and the design had to be distinctive enough to win customers over. Basically you had to keep both the suppliers and the customers happy,” she said of those years. “I took the orders, did the product research and development, the posting, the production, the PR, the packaging — everything. The beginning was harder than I expected. I still think I can pack a box faster than anyone else in the office. You have to make up your mind and drop everything else to get through that stage.”

The turn came in 1993. Until then she had sold on consignment through department stores; now she opened her first flagship, on the second floor of a building on Walton Street, in London’s Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. “I couldn’t afford the rent on the ground floor,” she told QDaily.

Kensington and Chelsea has London’s highest property prices and lowest crime, and is home to politicians and society figures of every sort; Kensington Palace — where Princess Diana once lived and where Prince William and his family live now — is nearby. The shop gradually began drawing Princess Diana, along with honorary queens and princesses from across Europe.

“She was a loyal customer, and she was funny,” Hindmarch said of Princess Diana. “She’d come and see us when she had no security with her. We could never stop laughing while we designed what she called her ‘cleavage bags.’ They got the name because, stepping out of the car, she’d use that satin clutch to cover her cleavage.”

Born Into a Family of Entrepreneurs, Anya Hindmarch Is the Textbook “Thatcher’s Child”

Anya Hindmarch never went to university; she started a business as soon as she came of age. Personal nerve had something to do with it, but her family and the current of the Thatcher years did more.

She was born into a family of entrepreneurs. Her father started his own business at 18 and built a successful plastics company; her sister Nicole founded the Wedding List Company, a wedding-gift registry; her brother William owns a lottery company.

“I come from a family where everybody had their own business, so it didn’t feel different. Starting a business in my teens wasn’t a strange idea to me,” Hindmarch has said. “On top of that, Britain was in a particular moment then — around the time I set up the company there was this idea in the air, this momentum, this movement about starting your own business.”

Anya Hindmarch is a committed Conservative, a believer in Thatcherism, and a beneficiary of Thatcher’s free-market policies — you have probably heard the uplifting story of the grocer’s daughter who became prime minister of Great Britain. “That was the start of privatization, and I had this feeling of ‘go out, do it yourself, become an entrepreneur.’ I saw politics change things. That was inspiring. That’s why I feel so passionately about it,” said Hindmarch, who often talks about the difference “Thatcher’s empowerment” made when she was starting out.

Besides designer and businesswoman, Anya Hindmarch is a UK trade ambassador, a non-executive director of the British Fashion Council, and a trustee of the Royal College of Art and the Design Museum. In 2009 she was made an MBE for her contribution to British fashion.

“[Anya Hindmarch] never tried to become Gucci or Prada. She went her own way. I think she has an identity you can recognize — grown-up and stylish without ever going over the top,” is how Tommy Hilfiger sums up Anya Hindmarch.

Vanity Fair has cast Anya Hindmarch as a woman with a perfect family and a successful career. She has five children, three of them her husband’s by his late first wife. The husband, James McArthur, had worked at Balenciaga and joined the company in 1996 to handle everything to do with money and the law. They go in to the office together every day and work on different floors.

For Anya Hindmarch, life has two centers, family and work, and no clear line between them.

“She’s the woman I want to be, and I think a lot of women would say the same,” said the perfumer Jo Malone, a close friend who made Hindmarch a Pomegranate Noir scent. Malone left school at 15.

“When you start a business you think you’re going to be a designer, but in fact you spend most of your time on other things, some of them nothing to do with the business at all — just the ‘noise’ that comes with growing one. The hardest part, I think, is fighting through that noise,” Hindmarch has said. “Someone once said to me, ‘Behave as though you burn yourself down every night and come back the next day as a brand-new person.’ I love that.”

Cover image: Anya Hindmarch