In August I wrote about the week Italian women put the straw bag away, and about what takes its place: a woven leather tote with the same open, hand-worked look, built to last past the summer. A lot of you wrote back to say you had made the switch.
So I owe you the rest of the story. On every fall buying trip, somewhere around the last week of October, I watch that tote disappear too. Nobody announces it. It simply stops coming out of the house.
A tote is a summer idea
An open tote is built for a certain kind of day. You drop things in without looking. You set it on a café chair, on the floor of the car, on the sand. It stays open because nothing about a September afternoon asks it to close.
Late October asks. In Milan the evenings turn dark and damp, the coats come out, and the city moves back indoors and onto crowded trams. A bag with no top suddenly feels like a small open question hanging off your shoulder. And a big bag against a coat never looks quite right: the coat has the volume now, and the bag has to give some of it back.
There is a calendar reason too. Tonight Italy turns its clocks back an hour, and from tomorrow the sun sets over Rome a little after five. The day ends in the dark, and a woman heading from the office to dinner wants her keys, her phone and her hands close to her.
The weave stays
Here is what does not change: the texture. The woven tote worked in September because it carried the look of straw into a sturdier material, and no one in Italy wants to give that texture up just because the weather turned.
Weaving leather is an old habit in the Veneto. Bottega Veneta, founded in Vicenza in 1966, built its whole name on intrecciato — thin strips of leather woven by hand, borrowing from the basket-making tradition of the region. The idea was never seasonal. A weave looks as right against a wool coat as it did against linen.
So the weave survives the second switch. Almost everything else about the bag changes.
What the second switch changes
Stand on a corner in Milan in November and watch the bags go by, and three things are different from September.
- The color drops a shade. Cognac and sage give way to black, olive and grey — colors that sit quietly against a camel or charcoal coat instead of competing with it.
- The bag gets smaller, and it closes. A zip, a flap, a turn-lock. Just big enough for a phone, a card case, keys and a lipstick.
- It moves closer to the body. Tucked under the arm, carried in the hand, or worn across the body under an open coat.
The three I would reach for this month each do it a different way. The black woven knot-handle hobo keeps the soft, slouchy shape of a tote but sits right under the arm; it is woven from leather-look strips in a matte black that goes with every coat you own. The olive woven top-handle bag is genuine leather in a dense intrecciato weave, about ten and a half inches wide, and it zips shut. And the grey quilted crossbody on its gold-tone chain is the one for evenings, small enough to wear across the body under a coat.
None of this means the tote is finished. It goes on the shelf beside the straw bag, and both come back out when it is warm enough to leave things open again. In Sarasota, where coat weather is more of a rumor, the switch has less to do with the cold and more to do with the evenings. The moment you start going out after dark, a small bag that closes simply feels right.
The straw bag taught the first half of the lesson. The second half is this: as the days get shorter, so does the list of what you carry. The rest of this fall's bags are in the bag edit.
She travels to Italy each season to hand-select the boutique's collection.
Keep reading
How to Choose an Italian Leather Bag
The One Thing Italian Women Never Leave Home Without
