Practical and purposeful, as well as one of the more accessible entry points into owning luxury fashion, handbag design is timeless. Until humans evolve to have pouches or grow more arms, the need to have a bag to carry things will always be with us. While much of fashion is concerned with innovation, nowness, and newness, handbags thus present a challenge for designers to create pieces that both function as timeless, practical companions and signifiers of an artful awareness of contemporary aesthetic culture – all while fitting these pieces holistically into the vision of their collection as a whole.
Fall 2024 saw creative directors rise to this challenge with a plethora of must-have bags – including many that were oversized – carrying forward heritage classics while embracing a distinct design vision as well as tapping into the season’s emerging trends, like hyper-texture and femininity.
Stella McCartney and Jil Sander embraced fluff and fringe. Prada showed there’s still ways to innovate with the basic structure and function of a bag through its arm-belt idea. Chloé and Isabel Marant extended their boho-chic revival across bags. At Gucci, Sabato De Sarno quietly evolved the house’s classics into new staples of style through subtle reconsiderations of color, shape, and texture possibilities.
Here are The Impression’s picks for the best handbags of the Fall 2024 runway season.
