Man Bag Business Is Booming

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Complex Original

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Every season, designers send their models down the runway kitted up heavy with a lot of shit we likely never end up wearing. It's a function of showing off the collection with a full vision. While I tend to gloss over the extraneous gear like luxury leather bags, Quartz reports that the the luxury man bag business is booming. One out of every five "luxury bags" is a men's bag. That statistic includes everything from duffels to totes to the elegantly crafted pieces from brands like Want Essentiels De La Vie. In fact, the market for men's bags has doubled in the past decade and today men are spending nearly $6 billion dollars per year on stuff to carry their other stuff.

But it's not that more and more men are buying them—that growth is around 4% per year. It's actually the fact that we're dropping more coin. Simply put, leather prices are up and luxury brands need that quality material to sell their ridiculously pricey bags. Man bags were never more present than this season at Paris Fashion Week where usual suspects like Valentino, Louis Vuitton and Hermés had their takes firmly on display, though Thom Browne's whale bag was the crown jewel. Kid Cudi's face says it all.

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