The briefcase used to be ubiquitous. Before the advent and widespread adoption of digital technology in the 1980s and 1990s, it was the definitive work bag for decades. I have vivid memories of my dad’s briefcase: a formidable brown leather bag engraved with his initials, stuffed with file folders, legal pads, documents, highlighters, and blue BIC ballpoint pens. It was mysterious and impenetrable to me—very masculine, very grown-up, very much giving “DAD.”
In those days, no self-respecting adult man wore a backpack. That’s what I wore. Backpacks were for schoolchildren.
Not anymore.
Some of my readers may know that I’ve written about what I call “Unpretentious Genius Aesthetic.” The basic idea being that our Bay Area-based tech overlords and various “relatable” celebrities created a kind of anti-fashion uniform—marked by plain grey t-shirts, machine-washable sneakers, blue jeans, and sweatpants—emblematic of their narcissistic belief that they are “above” fashion and simply “don’t care.” I argued that this fundamentally lacks respect for oneself and respect for you (the employee, the general public).
As a trend, I think this still holds up. But I overlooked something crucial for white-collar office workers the world over: the backpack. I neglected to consider the backpack.
Upon further examination (using my feminine intuition), I’ve come to the conclusion that backpacks are a psyop. We’ve been brainwashed by Big Backpack, which is under the thumb of Big Tech. As Britney Jean Spears once said, “This is a conspiracy theory that I am actually interested in.”
You did not choose the backpack. The backpack chose you. The backpack is probably the most prevalent accessory of the modern era, cutting across gender, culture, and country. They’re everywhere. They plague our streets. And the backpack’s ubiquity is indicative of much larger, more sinister shifts in our culture.
Let’s take a look at some of the possible reasons for the backpack’s dominance and the briefcase’s disappearance.
(Disclaimer: I wrote this piece mostly for men because I cannot stomach seeing another man wearing an Osprey backpack over his navy suit jacket. For women, a tote bag or purse are perfectly appropriate work options. But don’t knock the briefcase until you try it!)
Practically speaking, you have no choice but to wear a backpack.
Look, I get it. You need a backpack to fit all your stuff. But why do we have so much stuff to carry? Materialism aside, we don’t live in small, local communities anymore. Rarely do we live and work in the same zip code. We have to commute, sometimes for hours a day, and often spend the entire day many miles from our homes.
This means that you have to carry everything you need for the entire day. I used to pack my work backpack with the seriousness of a solider heading into battle. You can’t forget anything. Your day will be ruined. There’s no running home to grab something. Asking a stranger in New York City to borrow their charger? You’re out of your goddamn mind. Throw in some workout clothes and you may as well be a pack animal.
This hasn’t always been the case. Back in the day, even if you had to commute, you could simply arrive at your office and all your stuff would be there waiting for you next to a delicious little pastry. You could commute with just your keys, wallet, and newspaper. Now, most white-collar knowledge workers don’t even have a desk to call their own, let alone a cubicle or private office. In an effort to save money on real estate and foster “collaboration” through a little something called “hot-desking,” corporations basically force their employees to carry their laptops and work supplies with them all day, every day. (Ironically, hot-desking actually reduces productivity. Oops.)
This phenomenon has the added benefit of basically ensuring employees have their computers on them at all times just in case they need to “log back on” at home. Just in case, in this context, translates to inevitably. This is good for the company, but obviously totally sucks for you. Every day, you have to lug everything to and fro and essentially be at work every waking minute of your life. We’re like a family here! You can work from anywhere! Your exploitation will be sold back to you as empowerment. I suppose digital nomads don’t travel quite as light as we thought.
The globo-corporate culture infantilizes adults.
I’ve joked in the past that working at Google is like checking yourself into adult daycare. There’s a lot about the place that is pretty infantilizing: the primary colors, the goo-goo-ga-ga company name, the whirligig propeller hats, the bikes, the napping pods, the snacks, the fitness and cooking classes (I could go on). There’s even a dog park on campus called “The Doogleplex.”
Sounds great, right? Yeah, it also sounds a lot like kindergarten.
I get why people would see all this stuff as harmless, fun perks, but—as always when there’s money and shareholders involved—there’s a dark side. This kind of all-consuming corporate culture is designed to keep you at the office as much as possible and make it literally impossible to find another company that can compete. That way you never leave.
In an environment like this—and in San Francisco in general, let’s be honest—you look like a stiff, overly-formal freak if you’re not wearing a backpack.
This might have started at places like Google, but this infantilizing attitude has trickled down to companies everywhere. (Then again, maybe we don’t want to grow up.)
You couldn’t buy a cool new leather briefcase even if you wanted to.
Now we can start to get really conspiratorial. This is where the snake starts eating itself. Countless startups with the culture and policies outlined above literally exist to put small manufacturers, artisans, and craftsmen out of business. This is the business model. We’ve eradicated the people who can even make these kinds of high-quality leather goods. Oh, you’re a small family business in Italy and you didn’t get into Google Adwords in time to be listed on the first three pages of search results? Arrivederci!
As a result, really nice work bags—the kind that last a lifetime—are now prohibitively, stupidly expensive. I mean, you could always spend $4,000 on a Prada saffiano leather briefcase, but that’s totally insane and, in my opinion, too flashy to be tasteful.
The cheapening effect of value engineering goes beyond the bags themselves. The necessity of a backpack, for all the reasons above, has affected fashion for the worse. It’s easy to complain about the proliferation of lumpy hoodies and t-shirts, but in practice, if you have to wear a backpack, you’re not going to wear a suit. You’re not going to ruin the structure of your suit’s shoulder by crushing it under a backpack. A suit and a backpack look patently ridiculous together, whether worn over the shoulders (egregiously bad), or carried to one side like a briefcase. It’s not that we stopped wearing suits so we stopped carrying briefcases. We stopped carrying briefcases so we stopped wearing suits. And that’s a shame. Nothing looks better on a man.
As an aside: if you are a man over thirty who works a white-collar office job, please know that the women at your office are silently yearning for you to wear an understated, well-fitting suit. In fact, I dare you to do it one day and see what happens. You don’t even have to wear a tie. I can almost guarantee multiple people will say some variation of, “Hey [YOUR NAME]! Looking good!”
Sneakers, blue jeans, and backpacks are for working stiffs. I truly never thought I’d say this, but to stand out, you might want to wear a suit and carry a briefcase.
The brief case for the briefcase
The briefcase has a reputation of being impractical and uncomfortable. None of this is true, as I’ll outline below, but even if it was, aesthetics are important. Beautiful, high-quality things are worthwhile and good. Was painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling practical? Are high heels comfortable? No, of course not.
Admittedly, there was a time when you could not easily put a computer in a briefcase. Briefcases were built to hold novels, loose-leaf notes, cigarettes, lipstick, a little black book, and a napkin with a man’s number on it—not heavy machinery. But today, you can absolutely fit a computer in your briefcase along with the usual miscellany. I mean, you’re probably reading this on a hand-held supercomputer right now.
The inherent constraints of a briefcase are a good thing. It forces you to focus. It sounds so obvious, but they are lighter to carry because they hold less stuff. The fact that a briefcase occupies one of your hands at all times means that you cannot easily text or scroll while you’re walking. Walking with a briefcase in hand is so much more pleasant than wearing a heavy backpack. You can swing it around a little bit (fun) and slide into cabs and restaurant booths much more easily. It’s much more courteous to your neighbors on the subway. Forgive me, but a backpack is nothing more than a loose sack. A briefcase protects your stuff. Yes, you’ll suffer with one cold hand all winter, but summer is the season when you can realize the briefcase’s true potential: no sweaty back.
The only problem is how hard they are to come by these days. If you’re interested, if I’ve convinced you at all, you have to go vintage, you have to be patient, and you can’t go Tumi. I think smooth black leather and silver hardware looks more modern, but that’s personal preference. I got absurdly lucky with mine: a 2002 Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche (Tom Ford era) black leather briefcase for a measly $250. It looks so good, I can’t believe it’s over 20 years old. I wish you even greater luck in your search.
I quoted Britney Spears, so I may as well quote Karl Marx: “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Perhaps it’s better to be dragged to one side than pushed down on both shoulders.