Women’s clothing has no pockets, men don’t use handbags – both of which are of course nonsense in 2022, and it’s not just young men who are following the trend towards men’s handbags. The practical companions are now called “Murse” and there are countless variations.
Men in skirts, in organza blouses, with puff sleeves, frills, pearl earrings, varnished fingernails and lipstick: playing with gender roles is a megatrend in fashion. But none of this has really become a mass phenomenon among men, even if celebrities like Harry Styles, Riccardo Simonetti or Lars Eidinger show it. However, what no longer seems to be a taboo for younger guys is the handbag – the men’s handbag called “Murse” (from “male purse”).
You can see men’s bags on the Internet with the Tik-Tok stars Elevator Boys and on the street with teens and twenty-somethings – whether in Tallinn, Tirana, Toulouse, Trieste or Trier. “Like the sneakers, the bag for men owes its current success to streetwear and its designers,” explains the style magazine “GQ”. The first men’s bags to make waves in this millennium were belt bags, which paved the way for other variants. “In particular, the collaboration between Louis Vuitton and Supreme in 2017 helped the bag for men to shine again.”
Now, of course, men’s handbags no longer look as slippery as they once did with Hape Kerkeling’s fictional character Horst Schlämmer. Most men’s bags don’t come as wrist bags. And it would also be bourgeois to express discomfort because the handbag is said to be a woman’s accessory that adorns men’s bodies. “Unisex” was around in the 70’s, “metrosexual” in the 90’s.
But why is the men’s handbag making a comeback now? In the US, “sales of men’s and unisex handbags have increased by 700 percent within three years,” says Carl Tillessen of the German Fashion Institute (DMI). However, he emphasizes: “The current boom in the “Murse” has nothing to do with gender fluidity. On the contrary: it is striking that men’s handbags seem to be particularly popular with broad-shouldered, wide-legged machos.”
The DMI chief analyst Tillessen explains: “The fact that there were no handbags for men in the past is just as pointless as the fact that women’s clothing had no inside pockets. Because: We all need storage space for keys, wallets and mobile phones in our outfits. everything that we carry around with us.” According to Tillessen, there are good reasons that made the boom in men’s handbags so urgent and have led to men overcoming their culturally conditioned fears of contact with handbags.
On the one hand, there is climate change, which means that many people are more and more often out and about without a jacket and therefore without storage space on their bodies. “In addition, jogging pants are the standard in men’s wardrobes, which is one reason why men’s bags have re-established themselves. In contrast to jeans, you can’t put heavy and sharp-edged objects such as keys and mobile phones in the pockets of jogging pants because of the flexible fabric.” Accordingly, the men who like to walk around in jogging pants were the first to wear bags in recent times.
By the way: depicting the bag as a men’s raid in women’s fashion is actually quite a bit of nonsense. Because in history men often carried bags. Belt bags in the Middle Ages, embroidered hunting bags in the early modern period. Only in the 20th century was the alleged ballast of an extra bag suddenly taboo. In the 1970s, fashion with narrow silhouettes and, above all, tight trousers led to men outsourcing things like wallets to larger wallets with wrist straps. But as early as the 80s, it was considered “too feminine” again.
The fanny pack under clothing and the rucksack were perhaps also accepted. But in the age of digitization and especially the smartphone, which often looks too big and ugly in your pocket, the question arises: How to transport all this stuff? In recent years, therefore, the belt or fanny pack has started its triumphal march, which previously only seemed to be reserved for waiters, conductors or Ballermann tourists, who were considered embarrassing.
Today, the belt bag – best worn casually as a cross-body bag, i.e. worn diagonally across the chest – is popular with both men and women. The actual bag is placed on the front or under the armpits. There is now just as much hype about some bags as there is about the trend and cult object of sports shoes, i.e. sneakers.
