My work bag is closer in scale to a laundry basket than the tiny handbags clutched by models

Fashion sometimes excludes people on grounds that are truly nasty and toxic and which reflect and drive fundamental problems in our culture: race, weight, wealth. So I hesitate to bring up what I’m about to say because it is small-fry compared with those issues. What I want to talk about today is not, in the scheme of things, any kind of hard luck story. But I am going to bring it up anyway.

The microaggression for which I would like to call out fashion, today, is for all the times it has made me feel excluded because my handbag is inelegantly big and heavy. I have quite often felt like a no-hope outcast from glamour, on the grounds that the outfits fashion celebrates on catwalks or billboards or red carpets feature a handbag no bigger than a hardback novel, while the bag I carry to the office and back every day is closer in scale to a laundry basket.