The Conundrum of the Bucket Bag

If there’s one handbag silhouette that feels the most universally divided, it’s the bucket bag. I myself have swung towards both sides of the pendulum, operating very much on a love-it-or-hate-it agenda.

In the early 2010s, when the Mansur Gavriel Bucket bag burst onto the scene, catapulting the bucket bag’s popularity, I was one of many waiting in online queues for a chance at one. Eventually, I did snag one—in brown with a baby (read: millennial) pink interior. I was obsessed.

The Problem With the Bucket Bag

Ultimately, I never reached for that bag as much as I should have. In theory, I loved it, but in reality, I found it never really worked for me. Maybe it was that I found the drawstring closure cumbersome or the silhouette kind of, well, messy, but after I stopped wearing that bag, I never bought another bucket bag again.

Still, I’m drawn to them from time to time, but typically something about the silhouette of a bucket bag always falls short for me, and apparently I’m not alone. I spoke to my friend Alex, who is a styling assistant and vintage dealer extraordinaire, about this very topic over the weekend.

Alex, who sources vintage from all over the world and through many different avenues, sourced two vintage bucket bags as part of an auction listing she won from the Brooklyn Museum—how amazing! One, a vintage Bottega Veneta bucket bag, and the second, a Versace. Both bags have been a hard sell, and we found ourselves wondering why.

The Mansur Gavriel Effect

The bucket bag trend peaked in the 2010s, in large part because of that exact Mansur Gavriel bag. At the time of its release, fashion was also (finally) moving away from the maximalism of the aughts, and Mansur Gavriel was the first of many to embrace a most minimalistic feel, and the bag’s simple silhouette fit the bill.

While bucket bags have seen resurgences in popularity since then (what goes around always comes back around), they haven’t reached that same peak popularity they once held, and it left me wondering if they ever will. The mid-2010s were such a specific moment in fashion, and the bucket bag trend was largely driven by the virality and cult appeal of the Mansur Gavriel bucket bag—a formula that is nearly impossible to replicate.

Can the Bucket Bag Have Another Moment?

Maybe that’s the problem with the bucket bag: it’s become so intrinsically tied to a very specific moment in fashion that it’s hard to imagine it having another one of its own. Trends can—and do—come back, but they rarely return in exactly the same way. So while I may continue to find myself drawn to the bucket bag every now and then, I’m not sure I’ll ever become a true convert. For now, I’ll remain firmly on the fence.