Why Animal-Shaped Bags Are All The Rage These Days

The question I am asked most at this stage of my life is, “Where’s Björk?” I do not mean the artist Björk, but instead the other Björk, my pug. She also owns a swan dress, hand-sewn by my boyfriend.

This past New York Fashion Week, when I was walking towards the line at the Puppets & Puppets fall 2023 show in Lower Manhattan, four of my fashion editor friends saw me and started screaming, "Where's Björk?" The nearby street style photographers perked up, which is reasonable: if the avant-garde Icelandic star were to make an appearance at any NYFW show, it would be the one with freaky-resin egg bodices and banana-handle bags. In the confusion that ensued, I watched actress Jemima Kirke slip past the paparazzi. Before anyone could become too disappointed by the absence of either Björk, I pulled out a Judith Lieberman doberman clutch covered in crystals. My friends gasped with delight—as they should.

This bag was one of six animal-shaped accessories I carried throughout New York Fashion Week. It wasn’t about trying to appease people who would rather see my dog than me, or to continue my deep dive into animal-bag journalism, which began last October with an investigation into the appeal of JW Anderson’s viral pigeon bag. It was about something bigger. Something more primal.

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It all started at the Collina Strada fall 2023 show. My outfit had to center around a Tory Burch bunny bag that looked like a luxe stuffed animal, but with a crossbody strap. She was named Reva, and came dressed in a Tory Burch logo cardigan complete with a red leather envelope as a nod to Lunar New Year. I had never gotten dressed while thinking about rabbits, but it was surprisingly easy. Neutrals were the only thing that made the bag feel grounded, so I wore pleated Interior khakis with yellow stitched trompe l'oeil back pockets, a vintage lace button-down, a cropped cable knit sweater, secondhand square-toed oxford loafers from Prada’s 1999 collection, and a fur coat from the ‘70s with a sprawling furry collar made, I believe (unfortunately for Reva), out of rabbit.

I called a car and walked downstairs to the lobby of my apartment building, where I ran into two neighbours who told me I looked “fabulous!” One of them was with her small daughter, who grabbed at my bunny bag’s ear. But when I made it to Collina Strada’s venue, the still-under-construction House of Cannabis in SoHo, I started to feel slightly un-fabulous. Reva didn’t really match the energy of the crowd; everyone else seemed to be dressed in neon looks mimicking designer Hillary Taymour’s artsy-vegetarian-goes-to-a-rave aesthetic.

As I began walking up the seven flights of stairs to the runway, though, I found that people kept grabbing at my bag, just like my neighbour's toddler. “WHAT!” someone exclaimed. “That’s Tory Burch?” another said. “So the new Tory rebrand really is a little wacky….” the girl behind her leaned in to add. Someone whispered “Love!” into my ear, and seconds later another squealed. Six of my friends (and at least two strangers) now have photos of themselves standing in the middle of a crowded stairwell, drowning in colour, posing with my beige bunny bag pressed against their faces.

Fashion week sometimes results in people asking to take photos of my outfit, but they don't usually ask to wear part of it for their own pictures. Actually, most of the chatter at fashion week is quite frenzied, with editors, writers, and other industry insiders concerned about not being photographed enough or being photographed too much from the wrong angle, of unworthy seeming seat assignments, of influencers’s larger-than-life sequined hats or impossible deadlines or the wait time at Balthazar. The Collina Strada show was one of the first of the week, and people already seemed exhausted. My bunny bag, though, kicked them all back into the moment, giving them a reason to laugh—not at me, but at the simple pleasure of a stylish hare, like those we grew up tucking into bed with us, dressed up to attend a fashion show with adults.

If anyone understands that pleasure, it might be Taymour. It turned out that her show, titled "Please Don't Eat My Friends," featured models hopping and roaring down the runway of the show wearing toucan beaks and bunny ear prosthetics created by the makeup artist Isamaya Ffrench. When it was over, everyone kept telling me, “You’re on theme!”

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The very next day, I had the Sandy Liang show at 11am, all the way uptown on East 106th. I live in Brooklyn, and I didn’t plan my outfit the day. I quickly learned it’s hard to figure out how to wear an animal accessory in a hurry. Ultimately, I settled on a pair of light brown trousers worn under a vintage plaid mini skirt from the 2000s, the same vintage Prada loafers from the day before, and my favorite Marc Jacobs jacket with assorted patches of brown faux fur and fuzz, which made me look just like the accessory I'd chosen: Coach’s sold-out shearling teddy bear bag charm, clipped to my classic Chanel wallet on a chain.

The bear was huge, around one-third the size of the bag, which, while one of my favorites, sometimes feels too serious for me to wear. But the charm, the kind so cute you want to punch it, made it exactly the right kind of silly. That's not entirely out of keeping with Chanel's aesthetic: While the luxury house is mostly associated with classic quilted leather flap bags, it occasionally makes clutches in quirky shapes like film cameras and milk cartons. More and more, it appears that bags like those rare, whimsical Chanel ones are what the youth of today really want from luxury—pieces that telegraph personality rather than just wealth.

On TikTok, the younger generation of fashion fans really like this vibe of rich-but-funny, which they achieve not by buying super-rare bags that cost tens of thousands of dollars, but by adding cute little animal charms to designer bags that cost thousands of dollars. This relatively more accessible style is what served as inspiration for my look. And I get it now, it’s like a fuzzy disclaimer that creates some distance from the obvious financial inequality of it all; it’s not capitalism, it’s my childhood teddy!

I’m not sure if anyone saw my Chanel-bag-and-Coach-charm combination as a radical statement, but they did think it was very cute. Several people approached me to pet it after Sandy Liang. It also made me seem like someone with a good sense of humor, according to two waiters at The Mark hotel, where I stopped for breakfast after the show. “That’s hilarious,” one said. “I bet you’re funny,” said another. Now I know the easiest way to project humor without telling a single joke is to wear a fuzzy friend with all my most expensive accessories as a punch line.

This pattern repeated throughout the week: people approached me to pet my animal bag, people made assumptions about my wit, people decided they would put their jaded fashion week attitude aside for five minutes to tell me about their favorite nostalgic plushie from the ‘90s.

When I wore a pink-and-black crocheted raffia Collina Strada frog bag, someone asked if they could take a video of its mouth, opening and shutting with the help of a magnetic clasp, consuming my credit cards. When I wore a llama keychain attached to a vintage YSL mombasa bag, someone snapped a photo so they could locate the exact same one at the Union Square farmers market where I bought mine. My doberman clutch caused people on two separate occasions to chase me down a city block screaming, “IS THAT A JUDITH LIEBERMAN BAG?” Neither had ever seen one in person, and one mentioned that she thought only "eccentric and rich and fab 70-year-old women living on the Upper East Side" owned Judith Leiberman. Before I could tell her the bag was on loan, she looked me up and down and said, "But this makes so much sense!" I think it was a compliment.

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When I stepped out of a taxi into the middle of the garment district wearing an extremely large Thom Browne Hector bag, I made eye contact with a girl who twisted her head like an owl to study my every step as she continued down the street, nearly knocking into a bus station pole. I have never felt more powerful.

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The Judith Lieberman doberman clutch enjoying a front row seat at Kim Shui. The show took place at Capitale, a party venue on Bowery, which feels apt for the bedazzled pooch. (Courtesy of Tara Gonzalez)

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Hector, enjoying the pleasant breeze from midtown Manhattan while on the way to some appointments. (Courtesy of Tara Gonzalez)

All of the animal bags up until that point made me feel dainty with a dash of zany, but the Thom Browne Hector bag made me feel like a real bad bitch. It commanded as much presence as my real-life dog. Lily Miesmer, co-founder of the brand Interior, might have put it best when I wore it to an appointment at her studio: “Now that’s like a little talisman or a sculpture! It’s craftsman-y, you can tell it’s expensive and not cheap.”

Animal bags by Thom Browne or Judith Lieberman may seem like street style bait at first, but they look more like art than most conventionally fancy bags. They require true artistry, and like the best art, they make people have real feelings. I also learned, while on line at the crowded Luar show, that they make you seem important. The sea of strangers parted when people saw Hector. Someone even yelled, “Let this girl with the dog bag THROUGH!”

The next day, New York Fashion Week was officially over, and I walked outside for the first time in six days without an animal-shaped accessory, feeling a little bit empty. No one ran up to me unexpectedly to take a picture or unload childhood memories. No one told me I seemed funny or stared at me for a prolonged period of time with intense yet pleasant scrutiny.

What started out as an unhinged fashion experiment was starting to feel strangely profound. Maybe what fashion really needs is more bark…or bite…or both?

Everyone puts on clothes, but Fashion with a capital F has the tendency to feel exclusionary. If you're trying too hard to look cool, you're uncool. But if you're not trying hard enough, you risk looking like you don't get it. Animal bags don't really subscribe to these judgmental notions, though, because they're simply too ridiculous. Wearing them requires confidence, but the rare kind that makes you seem approachable instead of intimidating. They're the type of accessory you could have carried around in the midst of 2020, when it felt like the world was ending, and people would have still found it in them to smile. There's a lighthearted universality to them that makes everyone want to reach out and touch them, to talk to you even if you're a stranger.

As one random passerby put it so eloquently, hanging out a car window to scream at me and my Hector bag: "Yes! Yes! I don't know what that is, but that is what we need!"

This article originally appeared on Harper's BAZAAR US.