Bagging It

BAGGING IT

Tagging behind my father as we made our way from the subway to his office at NBC, I sometimes wondered why, on some days, he carried his Samsonite briefcase and on others, he carried only a grey envelope with an NBC logo. Years later, I realized that he rarely carried much of anything in his briefcase, or in the words of his 1960s office culture, his “attaché” case. His car keys lived in the pocket of his sport jacket, and his wallet lived in his back pocket.

When I started working in my first serious job, I carried my father’s Samsonite briefcase. Made of high-impact black plastic with a chrome frame, the attaché was 1970s chic… at least for middle class businessmen. Lawyers carried leather bags. The rest of us carried Samsonite.

By the late 1970s, I was wearing YSL suits and Pierre Cardin belts, so I bought a belting leather briefcase with a suede interior. Beautiful and expensive, it made me feel like the rising manager that I was learning to be. Working in Columbus, Ohio, I was fashionable. Returning to my New York City home base, I felt silly. Traveling the subways, walking the streets, I needed my hands free. I shopped around, but fashion hadn’t caught yet caught up with function. I kept my leather clamshell.

By the mid-1980s, I was working at home without a permanent office in Manhattan. What I needed was flexibility: a case large enough for a wad of file folders and the occasional loose-leaf binder; a space for keys; for a Walkman; for easily accessible train tickets. What I wanted would have lots of zippers and pockets. What I wanted turned out to be a Tenba photographer’s bag. Made of ballistic nylon, the Tenba briefcase had a shoulder strap-- I could hang my briefcase from my shoulder. I’d walk down Broadway and people would stop me and ask me about my shoulder bag. Some people made fun of me, and called me a woman. Cab drivers would sometimes shout a funny line as they drove by.

Although I was the very first person in the US to use a photography bag as a daily briefcase (okay, maybe the third), it wasn’t long before the entire male population of the US followed my lead. Then, Tumi became the bag of choice: a somewhat elegant combination of zippers and pockets, with at least one large enough for a cellular phone, available either in black nylon or black leather. It didn’t weigh much, and for a while, the bags seemed to be so well made, I bought the same brand’s products for my entire travel luggage collection.

It wasn’t long before I realized that my particular Tumi briefcase was a little too long, a little too wide, a little too cumbersome. The top of the soft bag seemed to crease with weight, causing zipper issues. I replaced mine with a strange looking vertical Tumi briefcase, and again, I caught the attention of witty cab drivers. Still, the solution was perfection, at least for a year: a top-loaded bag that discouraged my carrying too many heavy objects, with enough zippers and pockets to keep a growing collection of portable consumer electronics objects in place.

For a few weeks, I carried a computer bag, with what continues to masquerade as a portable computer inside. I quickly decided that carrying a six-pound portable computer plus a one-pound power supply was beyond my strength or understanding.

As my career moved from media producer to media executive, I adopted the style of the times: a black leather Coach shoulder bag with nickel fixings with a black leather portfolio inside. This matched my black pants, shoes, belt, and shirt. And when the dot.coms crashed, all of this pretentious nonsense ended up in the back of a closet.

A powerful severance package allowed me to be more selective, and more relaxed. My next bag was built from leather and canvas (not just any canvas, but the same type of treated canvas used for Civil War tents). Armed and ready for a meeting with Robert E. Lee, the new Schlessinger Adventurer bag secured my image as a creative professional and an executive… a rugged individual thinker with just enough conformity to be trusted with large sums of invested money.

The look seemed right, and the bag was large enough to carry the 3-pound portable computer that I used to impress investors, but our new company underperformed, and the truth was, I wasn’t going out as much as I was working in the office. So I really didn’t need a whole lot more than a bag to carry car keys, a Palm Treo phone, and a few other small items.

What I needed was (the cab drivers adored this one): a purse.

Again, I found what I wanted in a camera store. As an amateur photographer, I had become a fan of Billingham camera bags: well made in various canvas colors with leather trim. Lightweight. Very British. For a year, my “man purse” was Billingham’s Airport, a 6 inch by 9 inch shoulder bag with a small front flap pocket (for my Treo-- with a fit tight enough to cause the phone to auto-dial); a top open zippered area large enough for a paperback book and a pack of tissues with a small wad of keys on top; a side zippered area for some business cards and a small flashlight; and an open slash back for an airline ticket.

For important papers, I invested in an under-the-arm leather portfolio, hand-made in Washington state by Renaissance Art. (The company thrives on pseudo-Medieval designs, but their Pad Portfolio is understated with a vague taste of the American frontier-- allowing my witty children to poke fun of me as a “cowboy executive.”)

The combination worked for about a year, but the Billingham bag was always a little too small. Or, to put this in the more common female vernacular, I needed a larger purse.

The search wasn’t easy. By now, I really liked the British canvas and leather look, and I wanted something bigger but not too big. I wasted hours on the web, searching the world for the perfection. I found metrosexual messenger bags but they all reminded me of the all-black look I left behind with my dot.com experience. Besides, none seemed to embrace the many-pockets, many-zippers functionality that were now a part of my portable life.

On the web, I found a little company called Fogg. They make camera bags in canvas and leather, with lots of pockets and zippers, but there was only one store in the US that seemed to carry the bags. And the one I wanted-- the Jazz bag (all Fogg bags are musically named)-- didn’t seem to be available to anyone unwilling to trek to an obscure French country town.

So began a multi-month trans-Atlantic email correspondence about a bag. I learned about the inadequacies of the French postal system; the decision to leave the home/factory on the Thames; the slow and loving process of making truly excellent bags by hand; the loving and sometimes amusing relationship between bee (who runs the business and helps with the bags) and Nigel (who makes the bags and helps with the business); the relative merits of multiple pen loops; the difficulty in creating the perfect solution to manage a set of keys; and the moral codes that must be enforced when a tiny factory sends a product for review to a writer whom they’ve never met and have no good reason to believe to be anything more than a bag-napper.

As the correspondence slows, a box from France arrives. The box contains a smart shoulder bag that weighs a pound-and-a-half. The bag is ten inches high and nine wide, not large enough for a manila folder, but small enough to be carried everywhere. It’s four inches deep. There are four pockets, three protected by a top flap that cleverly stays closed with a minimalist “hasp, staple and lock-tab.” One pocket is gusseted, large enough for a Treo, a fistful of keys; and a dainty pack of tissues. Another is zippered to keep the small items (USB storage device; a tiny Leatherman portable tool kit; small Mag-Lite flashlight just in case). A third is big-mouthed, a top-loader that’s large enough for all sorts of daily stuff (see below). Inside the top flap there’s a small leather-mechanical slider that stores and hands-off business cards, and another that hides a passport. On the back of the bag, there’s another large gusseted pocket with a small top flap.

Over the past few months, I’ve found the large top-loading area to be more versatile than I’d anticipated. My daily load is a small 35mm Leica camera with an extra bit of film; a Filofax (a British loose-leaf based organization notebook that’s large enough for meeting notes); a Moleskine sketchbook (the large size just fits); and, on dubious days; a small portable umbrella. On weekends, the daily load is replaced by a full-sized Hasselblad 501CM medium-format camera, complete with a large electronic viewfinder. True to its roots as a photographer’s bag, the Fogg Jazz provides superior padding and protection.

The back flap area is now filled with a set of drawing pencils and, for color, a small set of Conte pastels. Sometimes, these are replaced by a set of 16 Winsor & Newtown watercolors in an enameled metal box.

And when I’m traveling, I’ll toss in a tiny Steiner monocular.

Nigel, bee, and I settled on a single pen loop, so I’m always ready with a pen, and if I happen to carry my video iPod with me, I can do so by either sacrificing the Leica camera for the day, or deciding against the drawing pencils. More often, I attach a tiny Fogg Quaver to the size of the bag (it’s an invisible Velcro attachment).

When I switched to a “larger purse,” I anticipated more funny comments from passers-by. But that’s not what has happened. No catcalls from cab drivers. Instead, I’m getting questions. Where did I get the bag? What’s inside? Is it well made? You know the answers to the first two questions. The answer to the third is an unqualified “yes.” Outside, the canvas and leather combination is extraordinary in its durability and in its ability (so far) to maintain its handsome profile regardless of the weight inside. Inside, everything’s lined with soft-but-strong linen, so nothing gets scratched or abused. The shoulder strap is hearty; the shoulder pad is rugged outside and soft inside, so a fully loaded bag doesn’t cause much strain. There’s a grab handle on top. And, there are three brass rings so it can be worn as a small backpack (yes, I carry a man purse, but no, I’m not ready to carry a mini-backpack with slender little straps).

Where does the bag go? Well, pretty much everywhere. And that means: I always have a camera, and a sketchbook on hand, along with a pen, business cards, a cell phone, keys, and a Filofax filled with notes and ideas and contact information. A good chunk of my professional and creative life in a bag made by British craftspeople in a small French countryside town. A friend calls it my “explorer bag,” which I much prefer to my “man purse.”

Inside the Jazz, there’s a small leather strip with a handwritten inked inscription. It reads: Jazz 8. Imagine: I am one of just 8 people who carry this bag. Somehow, that feels better than being one of perhaps 5 million people who owned the black plastic Samsonite briefcase.