côte&ciel Isar, 2 years
What is the geometry of carry? Usually a grid. Objects are knolled, thrown in cubes, then thrown next to other cubes inside of larger cubes. The objects themselves may not form a grid, but you are trying to make them snap to one. Some bags have rounded corners at the top, which fine, but that does make the whole system a little harder.
This god rapidly dies in the world of côte&ciel. The goal, I suppose, is to wear a bag that makes you look like you’ve been beamed out of another dimension. This is a common sentence that I get, so obviously I’m attracted to the thing. And I own a jacket that conveys this impression, although with one key difference: it is highly functional relative to a côte&ciel bag.
Their bags are sculptural, arepresentational, weird little black tailored puffballs that distend out of nowhere. Where is the opening? What is the logo? Is there a straight line anywhere on this thing? It’s doubly wild since they have been around, under the radar, for a while now, somehow managing to resist trend with that level of specificity while also foretelling our current apocalypse. Gosh, how did they do that?
If you know common “carry” precepts, you need to dispense with them immediately. If you expect your whole carry setup to coexist comfortably within a côte&ciel bag, you are missing the point. The bag is itself an accessory. The bag doesn’t care what you put in it. “Bags should?”, you ask. You’d think, right? But then there is this, and if you’re going to prioritize the visual of carrying a bag, and you’re going for a specific vibe, you can do far worse.
I was in Hong Kong 7 years ago for one of my regular birthday parties, and walked past a côte&ciel boutique in Sheung Wan. I walked out with an Isar, marveling at it. Was it a sling? A messenger bag? Why would nothing fit in it? I wore it for two years, anyway, and banged it up to such a degree that I would consider the bag finally “consumed.” Threads came out of the stitching between compartments; scuffs made it look worn.
Worn côte&ciel is, in my own lived experience, less fun. The objects need to look clean, tailored. Under load, they look bulbous and sometimes sit awkwardly, given your own center of gravity. It is better to under-load the bag by about a fourth to a third of what you expect it should carry. The whole point of côte&ciel is to brutally audit what you must bring out, and then resist backsliding. Look closer at the form, and you realize that the fabrics are relatively conventional, the stitching relatively fragile. These are not meant to be worn hard, they’re meant to be gazed at. Despite the fact that we very much wear hard in text, I insist that this represents a school of thought, not an unconditional downgrade, and it’s worth examining such ideas from time to time.
My own carry loads are anarchically variant and usually more significant than what this particular bag could haul, which I fully accept is more of a “me” thing. And so when I replaced this bag with something more “standard”, everything snapped to the grid, as one expects it to, and I felt a profound relief.
Still, the bag is there, asking questions, resisting the grid. What are the ramifications of unconventional form? Do you really need to haul that sort of load? How are you received, visually, as you move through the world? Can there be a different way?