Sometimes, a bag just doesn’t make sense until you see it on someone. I’ve seen the Melissa Floral Tote on plenty of retail websites, and I’ve always found it a bit confusing; Why the big strap? Why make the big strap a different color? It’s a nice bag, of course, but it didn’t quite click for me until I saw someone carrying the black version with its blue strap (it also comes with a tonal black strap) in front of me on Madison Avenue over the weekend. Then everything made sense.
The bag itself is quite petite, although not small enough to be non-functional; it’s about as big as the average crossbody, just made over in stately, structured, ladylike fashion. In that context, the contrasting strap makes sense, both in color and proportion, because it’s not the type of bag that anyone would expect to be carried that way – why not call that disharmony out to fashionable effect? The woman in front of me on the street was wearing the bag slung across her body, with the black bag and blue strap contrasting against her mustard yellow jacket. It was the picture of weekend elegance, which, as it turns out, is still an actual thing on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Who knew?
