Canvas Bags are The New Black
This morning, puffy-eyed and groggy, I opened the New York Times to the following headline, “IF you are reading this anytime after dawn on Wednesday, you are probably too late to make a fashion statement and simultaneously keep the world safe from plastic bags.”
“SHOOT!” I said aloud and now wide awake. I had missed it . . .
At 8 this morning, 15 New York City Whole Foods stores opened their doors to a stampede of anxious fashionistas, environmentalists, and environmentalistas (my made up word for the environmentally conscious yet admirably chic; I aspire to be one). The mob had been waiting for hours to get their hands on . . . a canvas bag? Of course, the natural food distributor was selling the uber-trendy and much coveted $15 cotton bags by Anya Hindmarch that read, “I’m not a plastic bag.”
Avoiding the use of plastic bags even in the name of frivolous fashion is a great idea. According to the Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research and advocacy group in Washington DC, Americans throw away 100 billion plastic bags a year, recycling less than 1 percent of them. Made from polyethylene, a depleting petroleum resource, the bags can take anywhere from 500-1000 years to disintegrate. While waiting around to biodegrade, the bags cause all sorts of problems from overcrowding landfill to entangling phone lines to snaring and suffocating animals.
For those of us that missed out on one of Anya’s coveted bags this morning, there are still plenty of great eco-totes to choose from. Check out the new Tripple Five Soul Recycled Shopper Bag . . . it’s pretty cute with a camo-pattern and comfortable straps.
Posted on July 18th, 2007 by Olivia Zaleski
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I was able to wait for the release of the bags in Beverley Hills store on Robertson in Los Angeles. I waited for over four hours to get my hands on one of the most desirable bags of the year. Being a fan of both the environmental movement and fashion, I though this bag was great.
From 6:30AM until the store opened at 10AM, I was able to talk to several people also waiting in line. Most people that were there either wanted a brand-name bag that would normally go for a lot more or they wanted to sell the bag on Ebay for $250+. Very few people wanted to actually use that bag for what it was meant for, a re-usable grocery shopping bag. I think if Anya really wanted to make an effect on our world and the way we look at the environment, she should have produced these in larger quantities. Since the resale value of these are going so high, people are generally reluctant to use these for a grocery bag. Also, it doesn’t help that a lot of movie stars are also carrying these around as regular handbags. However, this fad did start with Keira Knightly carrying this bag in the farmer’s market.
The picture posted in this blog is the UK Brown version. The US version has blue font. Anya has made it even more desirable by launching different bag colors across different continents. Visit the site below for more information about the bag.
http://anyahindmarch.com/division/environmental_bags.aspx
July 20th, 2007 at 5:17 pmI’m not a bag has become nothing more than a stupid fashion craze w/ high prices being fetched on ebay. The majority of these bags will probably only be used for trivial fashion purposes. If they really wanted to get the message out, they should have created far more of them and distributed them more widely. Instead it’s about as useless as the Live Earth Concerts.
July 20th, 2007 at 5:26 pm[…] these canvas cookies do wonders for reducing waste in the world. And some look fashionable to boot! Remember Olivia’s post about the bag that sold out in seconds? Well, there’s plenty more fashionable eco bags where that one came […]
November 19th, 2007 at 8:50 am