A Unified Theory of Bagmaxxing
Or how we're all being sold the commodified Jane Birkin fantasy.
In 2024, the handbag is no longer a status symbol unto itself, but a blank canvas upon which to flaunt one’s status symbols in the form of many, many expensive designer keychains.
The “bagmaxxing” look is all about micro-accessorizing run amok. It’s not one tasteful, statement keychain, but rather as many as the split ring can hold. You’ll know you’ve reached aesthetic nirvana when your purse looks like you just raided a Canal Street gift shop for every souvenir keychain they’ve got before hitting up a summer camp to swipe a couple of lanyards. But while this handbag decor may look very DIY to the untrained eye, it’s actually the carefully curated work of a luxury brand. Fashion houses are creating logo-heavy versions of these classic gas station tchotchkes and selling them back to their customers for around $500 a pop. This embrace of maximalist kitsch feels like a grown up take on the 90s schoolyard backpack laden with dangly accessories. A play to the nostalgia of youth as well as our nostalgia for Jane Birkin, the woman whom Hermès’s Birkin bag is named for and who famously painted, pinned, decorated, and generally abused that same bag. Bagmaxxing is an attempt to monetize that French fashion icon’s laissez-faire attitude towards luxury items and penchant for personalizing her possessions.
This knickknack-bedecked look all began on the runway with Miu Miu’s Spring 2024, Balenciaga’s Summer 2024, and Coach’s Fall 2024 collections, all of which featured bags festooned with charms and doodads. At Miu Miu, purses were decorated with straps and chains, left unfastened and stuffed full of every day must-have items creating a sort of pre-owned effect like a pair of faux distressed jeans. Balenciaga’s take on the trend involved creating garlands of branded keychains complete with fake keys that hung in thick waterfalls of junk off of their already very pricey Rodeo tote. And Coach made the bold suggestion that while all of these decorations are nice, what your bag really needs is another even smaller bag dangling off it.
This sudden proliferation of high fashion handbag accoutrement makes a lot of sense from a business perspective as luxury brands are always looking for that perfect impulse purchase item that will get a customer’s foot in the door. While most of what these designers sell will be completely unaffordable to the vast majority, creating a highly covetable mid-range object is a classic luxury strategy for building a consumer fanbase and fostering brand loyalty. This is a role traditionally filled by the label’s beauty offerings which provide a way to incorporate that logo into your life via a lipstick or a perfume that, while still pricey, won’t break the bank.
But for those who can afford the highest heights of luxury, like celebrities, this bagmaxxing movement has been picking up steam all year long. Famous folks like Lily Allen have been showing off their personalities on Instagram via some well-curated purse paraphernalia. On a recent vacation, the singer shared a photo of her lime green Birkin chilling poolside with a digital camera and Marc Jacobs Heaven keychain dangling from its straps which were also wrapped up in a green silk bandana. Lily then followed that up with another shot from the airport of her brown Birkin dripping in beaded embellishments, furry pompoms, and political pins. Dua Lipa likewise regularly uses a big black Birkin as a carry-on while traveling that she’s totally personalized with scarves, keychains, and charms. In July, Gigi Hadid carried a Miu Miu Arcadie purse at the Deadpool & Wolverine premiere that was dripping in keychains, including a custom one featuring a photo of Deadpool's face. And this weekend, Rachel Sennott celebrated her birthday by doing her brand ambassador due diligence and posing atop a bed with her pre-decorated Balenciaga Rodeo tote.
And, of course, where the A-list go, the rest of us follow. We’re now seeing this high fashion look trickle down to everyone else, with Lyst confirming in August that there’s been a 150% increase in searches for “charms” over the past six months. This sudden interest in the Birkinified bag can also be seen all over TikTok, from those buying the look straight from the store to those attempting to create it for themselves at home. Like creator Letao Chen who in multiple videos shows off the various ways she and a friend have pierced and pinned their Birkins, covering them in handmade ornaments composed of some of their most precious possessions to produce a visual effect the real Jane Birkin would be very proud of.
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On the more corporate end of the spectrum, every day on TikTok, Coach sales associate Brandon Nguyen demonstrates to his 300K+ followers how to style their bags by layering on carabiners, chains, leather accessories, and even smaller handbags, all currently available for purchase at Coach, naturally. Nguyen has found an ingenious way to take his commission-based job selling these designer products and give it the veneer of sheer practicality, as though he’s just doling out helpful styling advice instead of racking up additional sales. Through his TikToks, he’s successfully planted this nagging thought in his audience’s mind that no bag is really complete without these additional elements of purchasable ornamentation.
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But while luxury designers are certainly selling plenty of these pricey little purse bobbles, there’s also a market developing for the type of authentically retro plushies and neon plastic toys that once covered our schoolbags as kids. And here to meet that demand is the enterprising Instagram account @shopbagcrap which sells curated, thematic keychain grab bags, doing the heavy-lifting of perfect tchotchke coordination on your behalf. This small business was recently featured in Vogue and already boasts some very stylish followers, including stylist Gabriella Karefa-Johnson, Wall Street Journal executive fashion director Rory Satran, New York Post deputy fashion editor Anahita Moussavian, and even the fashion mind behind brat summer himself, stylist Chris Horan.
I would even go so far as to argue that the Stanley tumbler craze from earlier this year falls squarely within this bagmaxxing category. Not only are millions of water bottle enthusiasts misunderstanding the point of owning a reusable container to begin with, acquiring one in every color of the rainbow, they’re also turning these tumblers into pseudo-purses by strapping and clicking on various pieces of plastic paraphernalia to hold the rest of their various pieces of plastic paraphernalia. Stanley zealots are now tacking on these many, completely unnecessary, and fully color-coordinated trappings to transform these thermoses into the Swiss army knife of hot girl walks.
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While the Stanley example might seem a little extreme, it’s really just laying bare the grotesque hyper-consumerism that actually underpins this bagmaxxing trend. And, over and over again this year, we’ve seen the same form of peak capitalism inherent to bagmaxxing manifest in every facet of our lives and decor.
Having already sold us more than we can ever possibly use, we are now being trained by corporations to believe that even our objects are in need of more objects to support them. An idea that is, in turn, reinforced by social media and the many infomercial salespeople therein attempting to sell us the latest and greatest must-have. This same bottomless need to acquire the new can readily be seen in the way that even our homes are being transformed into small replicas of department stores. Perfume collections composed of hundreds, if not thousands, of bottles are organized by brand and placed on display shelves like they’re on sale at Macy’s. Or consider The Home Edit-fication of our pantries where everything now has to be labeled, color-coded, and decanted into clear containers to create a sort of minimalist window display of foodstuffs for your eyes only. Even our produce and juices are no longer safe from this zhushing with the rise of “fridge-scaping” which encourages homemakers to regularly transform the interiors of their icebox into various thematic landscapes, each of which obviously requires its own set of containers, foliage, and bric-a-brac to complete the scene.
But back to bagmaxxing. The reason this form of hat-on-a-hat consumerism is so successful is it provides the customer with the illusion of uniqueness and self-expression, while simultaneously selling them a pre-fab personality. It allows the buyer to outsource their own taste to a more “reliable” arbiter. Instead of trusting your own curatorial impulses, brands like Miu Miu, Balenciaga, and Coach take the guesswork out of identity, dictating to you what is cool (their brand) and reaffirming the idea that what’s cool costs a hell of a lot of money (everything they sell). You no longer have to actually use and abuse this high-end purse over years and years to replicate the aura of Mary-Kate Olsen’s wine-stained City bag. You don’t have to actually take that road trip to pick up a keychain that brings back memories from every state you visited. You can now buy that same experience — the patina of a life fully lived — fresh from the factory. The rich narrative, the lived-in-quality of the object is baked in to the purchase. A mass-produced, mass-marketed gesture towards our snowflake-esque individuality.
If you enjoyed this longform trend report, please let me know! I’d be happy to do more of this on a more regular basis if it’s something people are interested in. As always, thanks so much for reading and I’ll see you again Friday! <3
And lest you think after all that moralizing that I’m above participating in a little bagmaxxing myself:
Loved this essay! Would take 5,000 words on Stanley’s, Nalgenes and what your water bottle says about you
Maybe this is slightly dating me, but I'm wondering if the reason I like bagmaxxing so much is because it reminds me of the handphone charm era. I had so many of those charms hanging from my handphone case, to the point that my grandfather wondered if they would crack my screen 😂 the challenge is, as you said, how to maintain some level of individuality when theyre trying to pre-fab it for you. I can't imagine the trash that's going to be created when everyone gets rid of the charms they never had any connection to in the first place...