In the era of novelty bags, there is one that never seeks to leave my mind. That is the Chanel Milk Carton bag. Equal parts toy, collectible and amusement object, the Chanel Milk Carton Bag comes in several different iterations. And I really don’t mind, I’ll take any of them if the price is good enough.
The Chanel Milk Cartoon bag comes from one of the last great Chanel shows by Karl Lagerfeld. The year is 2014, and Lagerfeld has created one of his incredibly ostentatious runway set-ups. Namely, he constructed an entire themed supermarket with a shocking amount of products designed just for showmanship’s sake. “Karl Lagerfeld went one better for Fall and imagined the whole world as a megastore—un grand magasin—under the sign of the double C. The shelves of his extraordinarily detailed set were stacked with more than a hundred thousand items, brazenly advertised at 20 or 50 percent more,” wrote Vogue Runway. All the typical characters of the usual, regular shmegular grocery store were recast as items of fancy refinery from Chanel. Trash bags? Labeled as sac plus belle, for instance.
It was a delightful, satiric and witty commentary on consumer culture, as editors, buyers and VIP guests ran to the shelfs to stock their own bags as the show ended. But the real stars of the collected that still remains ’til this day? The bags. They are some of my favorite Chanel bags of all time, in fact. There were classic flap bags covered in shrink wrap like meat, chainlink shopping baskets full of a colorful collection of mini totes, and most distinctive of all: a silver silky milk carton bag emblazoned with “lait de coco” in rhinestones and pearls.
There have been some extraordinary bags covered in cookies, totes shaped like dogs and others mimicking baguettes–but nothing can ever come close to Chanel’s milk carton bag.
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