Eco-Chic

In less than a month, the newest “it” bag has sold out. In a panic, eBay profiteers have taken to the streets in search of Chinese-produced knock-offs to mark up 20 times, while those outside the fashion world wonder what in God’s good name is going on here. No, it’s not a new Hermes design nor the hippest Louis-Vuitton print. It’s Anya Hindmarch’s $10 canvas “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” tote, a response to the arguably environmentally devastating plastic shopping bag. But more than that, it’s an advertisement of your chic moral superiority.\nI want that bag as badly as some people want an iPhone. Just thinking how nicely my box of organic cookies, which features a Margaret Mead quote on the side, would look tucked in my Hindmarch tote sends a morally aware chill down my spine. Keep chomping on your partially hydrogenated chocolate-stuffed cookies, average Kroger shopper, my organic pride shields me from your eco-trashing. In fact, a farm-grown purse can turn solid, commercially produced peanut butter into the socially responsible, runny kind.\nI want to save Darfur and the icecaps, protect the bonobos, and end world hunger—but I’m only one woman! So instead I could do my part and buy a designer canvas bag. That low-price point is to encourage women everywhere (Milan, London, Hong Kong = everywhere) to do the “green” thing. But ladies such as me without a Manhattan address need a bag for free-range beef as well. Something canvas. Something recycled. Something unexpectedly tacky.\nConsider Goodwill the new fast track to bon-chic-bon-genre. Since canvas goes with everything, you’ll only need to buy one bag, hopefully which advertises a public library in Spanish or a Pfizer product. And of course, the practical upshot is that one less plastic bag means more petroleum for your fashionably gas-addicted ways! But among other reasons to ditch the quest for the Hindmarch tote is its production in China (low-price point, cheap Chinese labor; you say tomato ...) where the fuel used for transportation could actually outweigh the benefit of using that bag over plastic, and the cotton itself isn’t organic.\nI still haven’t found the perfect statement tote and felt rather embarrassed at Bloomingfoods when I was asked for my bag. It’s a bummer I can’t traipse around with my very own ethical bag whose actual ethics are, at the very least, questionable. But I was just kind of waiting for the invisible hand of capitalism to invisibly toss one into my outstretched palm. So I asked for paper.