Battle of the Work Totes: Longchamp vs. L.L. Bean

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, purse people of all ages, it is with bated breaths and bitten nails (to say nothing of the few bared fangs flashing from the bleachers) that I welcome you all to the fashion face-off of the century.

Tonight, we’ve gathered under the flickering fluorescence of our blue-light-filtered feeds to witness the ultimate conclusion to the crusade between two towering contenders in the colosseum of accessories who’ve been battling it out in the trenches of TikTok season after season. 

It is an epoch of epic proportions, one not even Homer could’ve heralded in his Hellenic histories for Christopher Nolan to adapt for the IMAX, a clash of tote titans so fiercely contentious it threatens to rip apart the very seams of modern society. Consider yourself warned; parental advisory is recommended.

In the blue corner – the French would correct you: mais oui, it’s navy! – sporting a sleek, water-resistant nylon shell and galloping straight out of the high-fashion arrondissements of Paris, is the foldable femme formidable, the continental choice of corporate commuters, and study abroad students, and our lightweight legend: the Longchamp Le Pliage! 

And in the red corner of the arena, we have the seemingly invincible incumbent from the saltwater shores of Freeport, Maine, the monogrammable monolith in indestructible 24 ounce cotton canvas made to withstand nuclear winters and Hamptons summers: L.L. Bean’s Boat and Tote!

Two utilitarian totems of the tote bag world, but only one gets to carry the crushing weight of your daily existence. Strap yourselves in, gird your loins, and prepare your credit cards, dear reader, because the crowd is on its feet, the jury is looking nervous, and a law-school girlie on TikTok just put her 14-inch MacBook Pro into a tote and squealed, “she fits!” 

Let the battle begin!

Round One: The Swimsuit Segment

For our first category, we concern ourselves with the most pressing of fashion questions: who fares better à la plage, the Le Pliage, or the Boat and Tote?

Philippe Cassegrain, grandson of Longchamp founder Jean Cassegrain, who pivoted the family business from pipe making to leather goods in 1948, was inspired by the Japanese art of origami to design the Le Pliage in 1993.

It folds flat and disappears into a carryon ahead of a weekend getaway, while its durable, washable, water-repellent nylon is just the thing you need to keep your spoils from the beach from spilling onto the Eurostar on the ride home!

But the L.L. Bean, originally envisioned in 1944 as an ice carrier (as in the frozen substance you put in a cooler before fishing), stands at a distinct, almost unfair, advantage. Because by 1965, when the Ice Carrier had been christened the Boat and Tote, those 500 pounds of ice it was designed to withstand had given way to beach towels, books and picnic paraphernalia for a Hamptons trip. Sure, the Le Pliage can survive the beach, but the Boat and Tote has been there since Memorial Day.

Winner: L.L. Bean.

Round Two: Evening Ready

Come sundown, however, is when things start to get interesting.

Where the standard nylon version of the Le Pliage navigates college dorms, publishing offices and front rows at fashion shows with equal parts gusto and je ne sais quoi, once the sun goes down and the lights come up (and the dress-code gets serious), it’s the Longchamp micro minis that truly shine. 

Whether you’re into influencer approved metallic embossed calfskins, bold colorblocking, or limited edition collabs with the likes of Jeremy Scott and André Saraiva, Longchamp has a Le Pliage for you. 

Quite the social calendar for a humble folding tote!

The Boat and Tote, however, wears no such hats—or, for that matter, veneer. It shows up at the dinner table looking exactly like the thing marinating on the beach that afternoon, sand and all: a canvas sack with rope handles. Works at a Nantucket clambake. Not so much where fancy tablecloths are involved.

Winner: Longchamp.

Round Three: Trivia Time!

In every pageant, dear reader, we reach the point where the contenders must prove they’re more than just a pretty face. That point is now.

And Longchamp’s story, named after the famed Parisian horseracing track in the Bois de Boulogne and in its first life, a purveyor of leather wrapped smoking pipes to Allied soldiers—Elvis famously owned one—feels straight out of a Sofia Coppola film. Then the Parisian tobacconist’s grandson, inspired by an origami crane, decided that leather deserves to fold, and now, the nylon workhorse is soldered to half of Europe’s shoulders. Ten are reportedly sold every minute, totaling to thirty million and counting since 1993. 

Suzy Menkes has admitted she collects them. Alexa Chung has one. So does Angela Merkel, Miley Cyrus, and my mom. Kate Moss and Karlie Kloss are avid aficionados, as is Kate Middleton, who wore hers to her St. Andrews graduation in a characteristic display of regal frugality.

The Boat and Tote, meanwhile, is almost equally as decorated. Painter Sam McKinniss laments leaving his version (custom embroidered LARRY) in a New York taxi. “The worst day of my life,” he says, two years and several replacements later, “like Kimora Lee Simmons with her matching Vuitton luggage, but way more WASPy.” The Gagosian Gallery notoriously (and briefly) gifted custom navy Boat and Totes to clients more excited about the bag than the seven figure paintings they’d purchased earlier that morning.

Writer Sarah Solomon has one monogrammed YUPPIE SCUM, spaced so badly it now gets read as something considerably ruder. “Hindsight is 20/20,” she shrugs. Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy carried one decades before TikTok got the wind of it, as did Chloë Sevigny and Anna Wintour, assistants still dropping off “the book” at the Vogue’s editor-in-chief’s residence even today!

Trivia score: a draw, because nobody says no to Anna.

Round Four: Putting It to the Test

And finally, there’s the question: which one hauls better?

The Le Pliage’s whole shtick is its flexibility—three folds and you can mail it in an envelope. Made possible by a water-resistant, lightweight, and wipe clean nylon, the trifecta of the modern commuter, it shrugs off an oat-milk matcha spill and probably has seen far worse. For roughly $180 for the classic tote (though the elevated leather variants I like also come with an elevated price tag), its entire raison d’être is that you can take it somewhere without having to think too hard about taking it somewhere.

The Boat and Tote, on the other hand, counters with sheer brute force: double-stitched cotton canvas, reinforced at the base, so stiff it can stand upright on its own, still guaranteed to hold that original 500 pounds (heck, I could fit in there). Nor does it bend or fold (New York Magazine’s Liza Corsillo says “It just sits in one place like a house basket. I don’t carry it anywhere.”) It’s also astonishingly cheap for something so mythologized – $30 to $50 for the classics – although a sufficiently weathered vintage specimen can run you upwards of $900 on eBay, (“I’d compare it to a pair of vintage 501s,” says Brian M. Davis, owner of Wooden Sleepers, an NY-based specialist of vintage Americana). 

And of course, what with all the quiet luxury hoo-ha,nothing appreciates in value quite like nostalgia for the Hamptons.

Winner: a draw, yet again. 

Grand Finale: And the Winner is…

“What, like it’s hard?” was what Elle Woods, the OG law school girlie, had asked. And even though we’ve arrived, dear reader, at the moment every pageant promises, it appears that the choice between the Longchamp Le Pliage and the L.L. Bean Boat and Tote is indeed a tough one.

But perhaps the two were never competing for the same crown in the first place. The Le Pliage, in its foldable, washable ubiquity, is a signal of practicality, a passport to your inner Parisian, whereas the Boat and Tote strives to be yours, specifically and permanently, embroidered with your name (or “Lexapro”) so it can be handed down like an heirloom.

At the end of the day, get the Longchamp if you want to disappear into a million identical totes, and feel very French about it, while the L.L. Bean is sure to outlast you, and potentially your offspring too, ready to be somebody else’s vintage find in forty years. So, maybe just get both?

I know, I’m seriously tempted.

Featured image via @longchamp and Vogue