Country Road to joy

You may be familiar with them: inexplicably bulging, weighing down the suffering shoulders of every second female between the ages of 14 and 25, the Country Road tote bag has become, to use my favourite abbreviation, ubiq.

The Country Road bag is a perfect example of a social meme uninfluenced - initially, at least - by advertising. The bag itself is a cylindrical canvas monstrosity of a 'sports' bag, the only adornment being 'COUNTRY ROAD' stamped on it lengthwise. What about this bag has caused its overwhelming popularity? Or perhaps a better question is: why this bag?

Country Road is not a label that carries the same kind of street-level heft as Juicy Couture, Guess, or even fake Louis Vuitton. The bag itself is certainly not alone in the market of massive canvas sports bags (Lonsdale do some nice ones). It usually retails for $59.95 - not really cheap, but within most young women's price range. The first models were navy with white straps, a plain canvas overnight bag, with a little class.

And I think that's what it is: the Country Road bag presents an accessible, if modest, status symbol - and more importantly, one that everyone knows and recognises. Carry a Country Road bag and you belong to a club. Carry a Country Road bag, and you're buying into a system of self-introduced cool. It's practical (those freakin' things can fit a tent, a change of clothes and your business/commerce textbook with room to spare), but it's trendy. It's acceptable utility, a relaxing of strict sartorial rules within a clearly-defined boundary of cool. It's the people's icon, not the fashion houses': someone, somwhere - someone cool - got an overnight bag instead of a Chloe tote for Christmas and decided to rock it. And my theory is, they rocked it SO HARD, everyone else started rocking it too.

The Country Road bag now comes in a plethora of colours, including the favoured stripe carried by a bulk of the young gay male population. Imitators have sprung up to be sneered at. There are purists who only want navy, and more importantly, the trend is popular enough to have those who loathe it. But Country Road never set out to create a social meme from their lame overnight bags. No-one put the Country Road bag on posters or in magazines. Fashionable young ladies prove once again to have more power within their demographic than all the slick advertising they are constantly bombarded with.

So, despite being a card-carrying Country Road bag abstainer: nice one, ladies. Nice.