This isn’t a fashion-week fad that quietly disappears by spring. Paris’s January menswear shows put bags at the centre of the Louis Vuitton, Dior Men, Prada and Celine runways. World Cup arrivals turned into a parallel tunnel-fit contest, borrowed straight from NBA culture. And the coverage of all of it keeps circling the same word — not logo, but craftsmanship. That’s the part worth paying attention to, because it’s the one bit of this you don’t need an athlete’s budget to buy into.
The Receipts
Kylian Mbappé is a Dior man through and through. Cristiano Ronaldo went with a clean Gucci duffle. Erling Haaland’s taste for Hermès runs deep enough that a Birkin did kit-bag duty on the way to a match — an odd sentence to type, and the one detail here that’s more about the price tag than the bag. NBA star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has made Louis Vuitton and Hermès a fixture of his tunnel walks. Timothée Chalamet crosses a Hermès mini Kelly over one shoulder like it’s nothing. A$AP Rocky turned up to Chanel’s own Paris show carrying a quilted Chanel briefcase. None of this is one outlier having a moment — it’s a pattern, and January’s menswear shows backed it up on the runway.
What’s Actually Shifted
Coverage of the trend — Forbes, Coveteur, and the outlets that track menswear closely — keeps landing on the same read: the bags getting attention aren’t the loudest ones. Heavy branding is giving ground to shape, material and texture — woven leather, raffia, unstructured softness that drapes rather than stands to attention. Call it quiet luxury if you want the shorthand. Whatever’s actually behind any single celebrity’s choice, that’s the frame the press keeps reaching for, and frames like that matter: they’re the reason a man carrying a bag now reads as considered, rather than as borrowing from a woman’s category. That permission is worth more to most readers than any specific bag in the photos.
What It Looks Like Without an Athlete’s Budget
None of the above — the Birkin, the Chanel quilting, the Dior runway bag — is the actual point for most people reading this. What sits underneath the trend is checkable, and it has nothing to do with who’s carrying it: how an edge is finished, whether a seam is folded or simply bound, whether the hardware is cast-and-plated or properly welded. That’s not fashion-week language. It’s the difference between a bag that earns its price and one that’s charging for the box.
Three of the twelve brands we cover make that case without a single logo doing the talking:
- Tusting (Buckinghamshire, since 1875) — full-grain leather through an eight-stage process, pattern-making to bench-work, with jacquard lining that’s woven rather than printed.
- Bennett Winch (London, since 2014) — solid brass hardware welded, not cast and plated. Invisible on a hanger, the whole difference after five years of use.
- Chapman (Cumbria, since 1984) — doesn’t burnish and lacquer its edges the way four-figure makers do, and doesn’t pretend to. £440 buys UK manufacture without a splurge-piece markup pretending otherwise.
All three would have looked exactly the same five years ago, before anyone thought to photograph a man holding a bag at all.
The Verdict
Take the permission, skip the price tag. If Haaland and Chalamet carrying leather has made it feel less like a stunt to be a man who owns a bag, that’s the useful part of this whole moment — use it as a reason to look closely at the next one you buy, not as a shopping list for the exact pieces in the photos. Check the edge, not the crest.