systematic viewpoints

It’s all Thomas’ fault.

Clearly not having enough with blogging about enterprise matters, he has shown us his sartorial leaning by introducing Dedicated Followers Of Fashion, or DFOF. Here he passes comments about the state of fashion in the tech community - apparently menswear in particular. Fun and occasionally snarky in a good-spirited way, I’m getting a big kick out of it and if I ever do run into him, I’ll pick my habadashery carefully.

Recently, Thomas and Cote posted some photos/videos featuring fetishistic messenger bags, and that’s where my troubles began.

I’ve had a long history of seeking the ‘perfect’ bag, a pursuit that shows all signs of being a lifelong habit. Either circumstances or dissatisfaction with some darned thing leads me to look for improvement, and just a week prior I was nosing around a luggage shop, apparently buying my daughter a better bag for her High School belongings. While the kids were distracted I snuck looks at the Manhattan Portage, Victorinox and lesser brand offerings.

Seeing the photos and video of Crumpler bags got me downright twitchy. I was determined to be rational about it all, so I ran aorund in a frenzy looking at Chromes, Timbuk2s, Briggs and Rileys…to no avail. They each had a fatal flaw of some sort or the other. But I wasn’t going to just cave in and order one, because the Crumpler was flawed as well - no outside pockets. I knew I had to see the bag for real.

Living in the NYC metro area has many perks, one of which is that there is a store that stocks anything you can imagine somewhere. I know there’s a Crumpler shop in the West Village, but I don’t get down there often. Today I stopped at B&H - a place I avoid because it’s very easy to get very stupid in there. But I was on a Mission. I headed straight to the bags and found the Part and Parcel. It took about 30 seconds for my remaining resolve to disappear, and I nabbed it along with a Thirsty side bag to compensate for the lack of external pockets.

So, here’s the bag porn:

Even the wrapper bag has the little Crumpler dude. Nice touch

Thirsty Large on it’s hang tag

Front

Back

Flap open

Swallowing a wide screen Dell

Dr. Strong-Tron tag - look closely, he’s made of bags

For a small pouch, it can hold a lot. The bottom is a stretchy neoprene-type material.

Video iPod, Blackberry and earplugs case

This bag is seriously built, better than most I’ve seen and seems quite comfortable. The strap is wildly long - I’m 6′ 3″ and it can hang below my knee - from top of strap to bottom of bag measure 4 feet! Adjustments are simple and the padding is super without being overly bulky. Hopefully I’ll keep this one more than my usual 18 months!

But the important question - why black when Crumpler makes such amazing colors? I spend a lot of my consulting time doing strategy with high-level execs. Low floors on Park Avenue are not good places for orange or robins-egg blue bags. Black blazer, black bag.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 9:37 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.