A bag for real men
A bag for realmen | Andrew Martin | Comment is free | The Guardian
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Visit any railway station or airport, and two modern phenomena are immediately apparent. First, people are much less encumbered by the sort of items that have been displaced by electronic gizmos – items such as notebooks, cameras, portable cassette players. Second, they are much more encumbered by the electronic gizmos that have displaced the notebooks, cameras and portable cassette players.
In short, almost any smartly dressed person will be carrying a laptop, and the men will be carrying them in a man-bag. Now man-bags are shoulder bags, and Tim Hutchful, spokesman for the British Chiropractic Association, warned this week that they "could cause back and shoulder pain from prolonged stress". "This could also impact posture," he added elegantly, before counselling: "We need to be more savvy in how we use them."
The best use of a man-bag would possibly be to leave it at home at all times – the impact on posture would then be much less. But their trendiness cannot be denied. While a correspondent to a newspaper recently reported "the man-bag has not yet reached as far as Bolton", it is all over London. Brad Pitt often sports one, as does David Beckham, which begs the question: "What the hell is in David Beckham's man-bag?" My guess would be the crumpled-up tissue paper that it contained when on display in Harrod's, thus maintaining its ideal shape.
Another imponderable is: how come their owners have had the nerve to go into a shop and say, "I would like a man-bag please?" In London's West End, I found a shop selling man-bags, and I put this very point to a member of the sales staff called Jack. "Well," he said equably, "you'd ask for a courier bag or a DJ bag." I would have asked him whether he felt that a man-bag (I was determined to persist with the term) might spoil the line of one's suit, except that, since the shop was called Crumple, I didn't think that would be much of an issue as far as Jack was concerned.
He showed me a series of admittedly pretty bags, featuring cosy nests for the sacred laptop, plus accommodation for any number of other objects. As is proved by the case of many women's handbags (especially my wife's), a bag once adopted for the transportation of supposed essentials such as emergency high-heeled shoes will have a tendency to fill up with about half a ton of extraneous rubbish, hence posture impacts.
Crumple is an Australian make, and Julian Assange has been photographed with one of their bags. This I find significant. Certainly Assange needs ready access to a laptop in his particular line of work – there is no doubt that he would be able to claim his laptop against tax. But the real point is that the antidote to the laptop-accommodating man‑bag of the type he favours is the old fashioned attache case, containing (usually under lock and key) paper ... And securely retained paper is the antidote to Julian Assange.
At Foster & Son, the bespoke leather goods shop in Jermyn Street, the shelf of attache cases used to run right round the premises. Today, it extends across only one wall. It seems that only the most rarefied City men need to carry paper. Plus, trains are so crowded that you can't set your attache case down and, since it must be carried manually, the owner cannot achieve the modern goal of having "hands free" (for the sending of vital texts).
Yet an attache case, because carried rather than worn, dictates an upright posture. And by its narrowness and inflexibility, it imposes a rigour of thought. You could fit your laptop in, but not your coat as well. (To the man who always carries a waterproof "just in case it rains", I say: "Listen to the weather forecast".)
The unmanliness of the man-bag is indicated by its name: "man-bag". It protests too much. By contrast, the fey name "attache case" indicates a certain sexual confidence. There are apparently indications that hard cases of various kinds might be making a return. It's the Mad Men effect. But surely the maddest men of all are the lop-sided man-bag martyrs.
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As part of our series on objectifying.
For about a year after I first got my laptop I resolutely carried it around, rather than using the shoulder strap which looks, as they say, indescribably naff. I eventually gave up, of course, as it's uncomfortable as hell and gives you blisters (that's not a very manly thing to admit, is it?) and makes it difficult to listen to music on the train. There's also the point to be made that in all the places I can afford to live in you need something with a strap that goes across you to prevent the local thugs from running off with it (a flick knife in your back pocket doesn't go amiss either).
Still, GPWM I feel. It's my new week's resolution to go back to carrying my laptop, intra-muros, at least.
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