Designer Detective

Last week, we rounded up the best accessory gifts for all the recent college grads in your life. In the comments, one of you asked us to make some suggestions for high school grads, and because we like to consider ourselves a full-service blogging operation here, we felt compelled to oblige. Almost any huge life change – graduation, moving to a new city, having a baby – impacts the way a woman interacts with the things that she carries every day, and I like to think that the best way to ready someone for a change like that is to get her the sartorial equipment she needs in order to settle in to her new life.

Thus, we present you with our picks for the best high school grad gifts. Leaving home for the first time is nerve-racking enough, but there are some things you can do to make sure your grad is prepared to take on college and hit the ground running. Not to mention, if you get her a nice overnight bag, maybe she’ll come home more often. (That’s a pretty good theory, I think. Write that one down.) Best of all, all of our picks are under $600.

Hear me out on the Marc Jacobs Quilted Key Pouch, because I can’t recommend it heartily enough. Entrance to almost all modern college dorms is done either by showing your school ID to a desk clerk or swiping it through a card reader, not to mention that school IDs are usually what gain you entrance to dining halls and school sporting events. At my school (UGA, Go Dawgs), you couldn’t even buy textbooks off campus without presenting that holiest of holy cards.

That means it’s important to have your ID handy at all times, lest you essentially lock yourself out of your own life without even losing your keys; attaching one of these pouches to your key ring keeps it with you. I’ve used one of these Marc Jacobs cardholders since my freshman year in college, and eight years later (yeesh), I still have the exact same one on my key ring. I had a cardholder from a different brand prior to getting this one, but it only lasted a few months because the zipper came loose and would slide open in my purse; this one locks in place, which is a much safer setup to hold ID cards. Buy through Barneys for $175.

Not long ago, I said that my feelings toward Thursday Friday’s line of bag-on-bag printed totes had “softened.” At that point, Balenciaga was the latest designer to have a photo of their work plastered on a canvas tote bag and sold for up to $90 apiece, and like Hermes and Chanel before it, Balenciaga is a huge brand with a huge corporate structure behind it to protect its work product. They can stand up for themselves, and although the Thursday Friday bags are certainly not my personal cup of tea, the combination of the chosen subject matter and the totes’ ubiquity had made me a little less opinionated about the whole thing.

Well. Guess what. This time, Thursday Friday has chosen to go after Proenza Schouler, a small New York brand that’s still in its relative infancy and that has yet to so much as open a brick-and-mortar store for itself. Compared to the Chanels of the world, Proenza Schouler is utterly tiny and a labor of love by the brand’s founders, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez. The success of the PS1 and the brand’s other accessories allow it to do some of the most beautiful and innovative textile work in modern fashion; clothes like that don’t often turn a profit because of the enormous expense associated with producing such technically complicated work in small quantities, so for Proenza Schouler and brands like it, handbags are a crucial part of the business model. But hey, who cares about all that? Let’s take someone else’s hard work, slap it on a tote bag and make some cash!

Picking on the big guys is one thing. Taking something iconic and asininely expensive and re-appropriating it to poke fun at the fashion establishment is a longstanding tradition in the industry, and not something I generally have a problem with it. In fact, I love seeing a few well-placed stones lobbed at the old guard; it’s good for our health, as a collective. The problem, though, is that Proenza Schouler isn’t the fashion establishment or the old guard; it’s a spunky upstart that makes a bag that’s been popular for a few years. With that in mind, Thursday Friday splashing Proenza’s work on a bag to fatten their own bank accounts seems crass and opportunistic. Picking on the little guy isn’t clever, and it’s certainly not something I’d ever advise anyone to spend money on.

If you’d like to buy a real Proenza Schouler bag, you can do so via the brand’s website. If you’d like to buy one of the Thursday Friday bags, I suggest you start Googling, because I’m not going to be providing any links to their “work.” If you can even call it that.

(If there were a way for me to drop the mic and stomp off stage on the Internet, this is where I’d do it.)