KEY POINTS:
Ever since Fendi launched its tiny, impractical Baguette in late 1990s, fashion has been It-bag obsessed. Each season brought a new version: the Christian Dior Saddle, the Mulberry Roxanne, the WAGs' (wives and girlfriends of professional footballers) favourite Balenciaga Lariat, the Chloe Paddington, the Marc Jacobs Stam ... All were big, expensive and adorned with locks and chains.
Then, late last year, with a "tag, you're It", came ... the Superdrug Prince's Trust. An ordinary cotton shopping bag, £2.99 ($8) from a high-street chemist, was suddenly what everyone wanted.
For this, as for so much fashion madness, we can blame Kate Moss. When the model was pictured carrying the charity bag in September 2006, Superdrug promptly sold out of its stock of 50,000 bags, which were designed by the Lancashire duo Kate Ball and Jenny Loram of the design team Dead on Arrival.
The pair explain: "We were confident the bag would have instant appeal to Superdrug's customers, but its desirability factor was certainly raised by Kate Moss. The fact that all proceeds of sales went to charity was an added incentive to buy."
If this had been just a charitable anomaly, the fashion and retail world could have moved on to the next It-bag, which this season was expected to be Yves Saint Laurent's £840 Downtown. Instead, YSL's fortunes were scuppered by I'm Not a Plastic Bag.
The £5 beige cotton tote, a collaboration between the designer Anya Hindmarch, Sainsbury's and the environmental group We Are What We Do, sold out within minutes of its release last month. Of the 20,000 sold, several hundred could later be found on eBay for up to £200.
"When an item is being sold for charity, it's not really in the spirit of the cause to exploit it," say the Dead on Arrival pair. "However, it's inevitable with auction sites like eBay, and at least the original selling price goes to charity."
And at least the message gets out there: shoppers will be less keen to be seen with a plastic bag.
This might be the only way to own an Anya Hindmarch design, which would usually retail for £500.
Similarly, Antoni & Alison has designed a series of bags for the Sue Ryder charity, which sell for £9.99.
One designer bag, the Chloe Paddington padlock satchel, is so popular that the stockist Bergdorf states that "due to high demand, a customer may order no more than three units of this item every 30 days". For those who have £29,000 to spare, as many as 36 bags can be bought annually. Sainsbury's customers were limited to one bag each.
Loram and Ball agree that environmental concerns are a small part of the appeal.
"Shoppers are probably more concerned with style, but it's a fantastic way to be more green without realising it."
However, the I'm Not a Plastic Bags are actually even less green than customers realised: they were made in China, using cheap labour, from non-fair trade, non-organic cotton - a fabric as environmentally damaging as plastic.
Petra Kjell, campaigner with the Environmental Justice Foundation, says: "Cotton accounts for 16 per cent of global insecticide releases - more than any other single crop. Of the US$2 billion ($2.73 billion) of chemical pesticides used on cotton crops each year, at least US$819 million are considered toxic enough to be classified as hazardous by the World Health Organisation. Aldicarb is one of the most toxic pesticides applied to cotton, yet it is also the second-most used pesticide in global cotton production. One teaspoonful of aldicarb on the skin would be sufficient to kill an adult."
Sainsbury's issued a statement saying it had "never claimed the bag was fair trade or organic. The point of the bag is that it can be re-used, thereby saving millions of plastic bags from being used in future years. The bag was designed to raise awareness of the issue of the abusive use of disposable plastic bags, a goal which it has achieved internationally, beyond anyone's expectations."
However, many shoppers said their I'm Not a Plastic Bag was handed to them in ... a plastic bag.
The next big high-street bag is the new Superdrug Prince's Trust, designed by Wale Adeyemi. Available for £4.99, in monochrome or emerald/ stripes, the bag sold out in online pre-sales in four hours.
"The key is great design," Loram and Ball insist. "If this is then endorsed by a celebrity the customer can relate to, like Drew Barrymore for New Look, and the price is realistic, you're on to a winner. The Prince's Trust is an example of good high-street fashion: a guilt-free purchase that looks great, saves the environment, gives to charity and can go in the washing machine when it gets dirty."
So can we look forward to a new charity canvas shopper each season? The town of Modbury, in Devon, banned plastic bags this month - and their limited edition of 2000 official Modbury organic cotton shopping bags are becoming collectors' items.
Dorothy Perkins and the Woodland Trust feature two totes bearing the slogan Plant More Trees. At £10, the bags cost twice the Sainsbury's offering, but their green credentials are twice as sound. Where I'm Not a Plastic Bag merely recouped production costs, £1.50 from each Dorothy Perkins bag goes direct to the Woodland Trust.
For his spring/summer 2007 Louis Vuitton collection, Marc Jacobs showed a red and white-check laminated laundry bag. At £1400, it requires a rather greater financial outlay - but do limit yourself to three a month.
- INDEPENDENT
