Dopp Gang

Dudes don’t usually need much to clean up: soap, comb, shaver, deodorant. For doing this on the road, and for all other sundries, there is the dopp kit, perhaps the last bastion of abject manliness in travel gear.

Note that the dopp kit is separate from your 311 bag, because we are still at war against liquids. The dopp kit used to exist in part to keep spills out of the rest of your bag. In practice, now the dopp kit exists to keep spills from getting into the rest of your toiletries – along with its regular duty of organization.

A shocking amount of effort is put into dopp kits. There are leather dopp kits, buy-it-for-life dopp kits, tactical dopp kits, designer dopp kits, small-batch artisanal dopp kits. All of this for an object that you will pack away at home most of the time, and keep in your private space the rest of the time. The only people who ever see your dopp kit are your partner and room cleaners.

It does matter that your dopp kit perform, hence this text. If you interact with any object daily, you should invest in it. This is the rule. We know this. Still, there is now a tension within all dopps between the desire to make something extremely fancy and the desire for it to work.