The Atlantic

Rise of the Lady Backpack

Some white-collar women are ditching their purses for a more practical toting solution. They say they’ll never go back.
Source: AfricaStudio / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

When Sara Farrar worked in California, she took a purse to work every day. It seemed like the hip thing to do, and since she drove to work, it was easy to toss the thing into the car in the morning. When she moved to a consulting job, she upgraded to a fancier purse so she could be taken seriously among her more well-heeled co-workers, “regardless of how impractical this was as I ran through the airports,” she told me via email.

Finally, after moving to New York and staring down a long commute from Brooklyn to Midtown in 2017, her resolve, like her spinal discs, began to thin. Her back hurt. The purse didn’t fit

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