The Viral Uniqlo Crescent Bag: I Love But Don't Want To Buy It
Should it matter that everyone carries it?
One night after work this week, I went to a Uniqlo outlet on the way home to pick up a shirt. I ended up spending more time in the store than it took for me to make my purchase.
Side note: do you feel like you can walk into the same Uniqlo store every few weeks and get a somewhat different experience?
Working at Uniqlo
I worked at the Singapore flagship Uniqlo store at Orchard Gateway for three months in my teens. It exemplified why I love Japan but am certain I’ll never survive its work culture. Uniqlo is probably my most hated part-time job.
From memory: we clocked in at around 7am. Before the centralised air-conditioning was on. Picked up walkie talkies. This was for managers to remind us mainly to greet customers or manage crowded zones. Studied our schedules for the day: we rotated among zones every hour or so. Dusted shelves. Cleaned mirrors. Swept floors. Air-folded clothes: pinched two ends of garments mid-air and performed magic tricks. Restocked shelves.
We gathered military style in front one row of cashiers. One of the managers briefed us about sales from the previous day, the sales target of the day, and other announcements. The head of something, an older Japanese lady who spoke heavily accented English, nagged us about decorum.
This lady never accepted no. In a bad way. If you were sick, you had to WhatsApp or call her in the morning or else… Once, she insulted me because my black pants weren’t black enough. I get uniforms (we wore all black), but my pants (I owned them before this job) had been washed multiple times, so they didn’t look 100% new. She made me pull out the tags of what I was wearing to prove everything was Uniqlo. I should’ve quit.
From facing the cashiers, we would turn to face each other. One of us was picked to lead a recitation of a series of phrases we’d picked up from orientation:
Hello, how are you today?
Yes, of course!
One moment please
Thank you for waiting
Thank you very much!
We hope to see you soon!
Then the store opened.
I didn’t know this was normal then: we were regularly asked to discount items just because. Maybe an analyst computed which items needed to move faster and made suggestions. I’ve seen TikTok ‘reveals’ of customers flipping over Uniqlo price display tags to find the corresponding items’ discounted prices printed on the paper strip behind.
We were also regularly asked to rearrange clothing sections. It makes the retail experience more exciting, if confusing is a synonym. That’s how, on my way from Point A to B this week, I stumbled on a display of the viral Uniqlo bags.
Viral Uniqlo Bag
Overview
I first saw the Uniqlo mini shoulder bag after it released in mid-2022. I believe this was around the time Uniqlo expanded into bags and shoes. It reminded me of The Row’s banana bag, which I don’t think had come out in nylon.
Design ‘integrity’ aside, I’ve learnt to be more discerning about wanting to buy something new from a brand because I liked something else I’d bought from it. A good brand is more likely to be reliable, but not always. My T-shirts are almost exclusively Uniqlo. I think their stretch denim is very dispensable. I’d been disappointed by some collaborations (i.e. with JW Anderson and Jil Sander).
Since this bag was part of a new category for Uniqlo, I thought it needed to be out for a while (i.e. for production and supply chain refinement) before it might be worth considering. An unsatisfactory $20 purchase is still wasted closet space.
Fast forward to April 2023: this BOF Instagram post popped up on my feed.
I instinctively thought this was an advertorial. I hadn’t spotted this bag permeating MRT trains and Orchard Road. I could see how it might be popular for function among music festival goers, but cult bag I couldn’t imagine it to be. Then I read the caption: it had topped Lyst’s Q1 2023 list for most searched fashion item.
Then the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon kicked in: this bag was everywhere.
My current travel influencer couple obsession, Sam and Victor, love their viral Uniqlo bags. Sam’s is black, Victor’s green. Sam’s bag lineup includes Y2K and new season designer mini shoulder bags, Chanel classic flaps, and the Uniqlo bag, which nicely amid the lineup almost as a market tote does. It’s unassumingly cool.
I tried it in-store. I get it. It embodies the effortlessness of a fanny pack, elevated with the crossbody strap of a hobo bag (it can be shortened to sit under your arm too). It has the perfect size of looks-small-fits-everything. It’s made from nylon, the silk of streetwear. I’m hyperbolising. It’s unisex. It comes in safe and bold colours. It’s $20.
Should I Buy It?
I felt ridiculous after this chat. The Row banana bag costs about $2,000 (200% more than the viral Uniqlo bag). I haven’t seen it in-person. I’m certain carrying it won’t make me 200% happier than the viral Uniqlo bag. The viral Uniqlo bag has managed, and I’m forgetting the exact quote on this type of phenomenon, to do this bag the last and therefore be perceived as the original. The best.
It’s also popular. “As we exit the summer of both Barbenheimer and Taylor Swift it seems like, yes, we are now fully in the era of fandom normie. My position is that the average person on the street is not participating in Barbenheimer fervor because they absolutely want to slob on Oppenheimer’s knob […] Nor have they become obsessed with the intricacies of the worldbuilding of the Barbie movie […]
“They’re doing it because it is, culturally, the Thing To Do. It’s fun! It’s fun, objectively, to participate in a trend. Everyone who took planking pictures in 2022 knows that. ‘Barbenheimer’, and to some extent its spiritual prequels the Summer of Morbius and the Gentleminions trend are all examples of the enjoyment people find in doing things in what I might describe as a ‘fandom way’—elaborate and all-in, full of pastiche and mash-up elements, joyful and odd,” wrote Allegra Rosenberg in ”Barbenheimer, The Eras Tour, And The Rise Of The Normie Fandom” for Garbage Day.
I think I struggle with ‘normal’. A new friend asked me recently if I liked indie music and went to music festivals. I told her I liked Lana Del Rey and would pay if she came to Singapore. “So you like mainstream music,” she said. I wasn’t able to verbalise my disagreement then: I like Lana Del Rey, who happens to have grown in popularity in the last few years.
I want to have my point of view. Don’t like to come off as another version of. It’s a mindset I developed in polytechnic. A response to the nauseating ‘trends’ I saw and was a victim of: Fjällräven Kanken backpacks, Adidas Superstars, ‘Ulzzang’ T-shirts on Ezbuy, ripped jeans, baseball caps, etc. I definitely bought these things to fit in.
Today, I try to be precise about the fashion I buy. I’m okay liking something and not owning it. “Author Daisuke Yosumi writes that we should consider stores as our personal warehouses. All those stores out there pay good sums of money to secure space so they can stock all sorts of goods for us, and they manage their items with care. Convenience stores welcome us around the clock. Yosumi suggests we should not think of these places as shops where we buy goods, but instead as our warehouses where we go to get something when we need it,” writes Fumio Sasaki in Goodbye, Things: On Minimalist Living.
So I judge. I wonder in the case of the viral Uniqlo bag, however, if I’m being arbitrarily judgemental. A friend recently admitted to not ordering the same food as someone she was with if they told her they wanted to eat X, even if she’d wanted to order X too. I own Uniqlo T-shirts. I like Lana Del Rey. I’m unaffected by the ‘mainstream-ness’ of other things. What’s different about the viral Uniqlo bag?
I’m considering contemporary alternatives. I recall a friend’s friend who works at Dover Street Market carrying a Marimekko Karla bag in 2019. Charmaine Seah-Ong posing with a Lemaire croissant bag for a Manifesto photo shoot in 2020.
I’ll probably visit a Uniqlo store again later this week to check out the bag. Should I get it?