The power of the luxury carrier bag

Inside the windows of the Sprüth Magers gallery in Mayfair, it looks like someone has dumped their expensive haul. Clutches of luxury-branded carrier bags — Prada, Versace, Chanel — lie abandoned on the gallery floor. The urge to run inside and do something — report a loss, rifle through the contents, grab a lucky dip and run — is overpowering.

In the heart of London’s luxury boutique district, this installation by the Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury reveals to us our darkest, most acquisitive instincts. When we step inside the gallery and take a closer look, we find bags that are dated, battered and possibly — although not definitely — empty.

“Those bags have always triggered things to think about: politics, sexuality, fetishism, femininity, globalisation,” Fleury says when I call her to ask her about her carrier bag installations, which she first exhibited in Lausanne in the early 1990s. “And yet they are kind of nothing. Which is what was interesting to me.”

Fleury’s abandoned bags may be more than 30 years old. But her installations continue to provoke serious questions: about the powerful, self-actualising instincts they induce; how empty luxury packaging commands our attention; and why these embossed confections remain so hard to chuck away long after they have served their purpose.

Part of the answer lies in design: luxury bags seduce us by masquerading as presents, with their rigid cardboard, satisfyingly crisp tissue paper and dinky bows, says Paurav Shukla, a professor of marketing of the University of Southampton.

Unlike a floppy, utilitarian carrier from a chain such as H&M or Zara, expensive stores dispense bags with elements that many of us find hard to resist because we associate them not with hard transactions, but with feelings of love and gratitude.

Shukla even describes them as a form of ritual: “Those ribbons and boxes and extra layers of paper are a demonstration of something very valuable,” he says. “You see it too in unboxing videos on social media: it is ceremony.”

Expensive packaging is driven by what Shukla calls its “value-associated luxury”, a phenomenon that appeared just 40 years ago, not long after Fleury, who is 62, first started to show her bags in galleries.

“Before about 1980, there was a very clear [global] divide between rich and poor and what they bought,” he says. “The rich bought luxe, the poor did not, and logos were small. But then a democratisation of luxury happened when a new segment of consumers — the global middle class — grew, and they had a phenomenal drive to demonstrate their status.

“Middle-class consumers wanted to signal two things: to lower-end consumers that they were moving beyond their world, and to tell the rich that they are going to be part of theirs.”

(Think of Julia Roberts in the 1990 film Pretty Woman, striding down Rodeo Drive with an armful of valedictory carrier bags, before waving them in the faces of snobbish shop assistants.)

“So conspicuous display mattered and it still does. Brands understood this well, and so they increased their logo sizes,” says Shukla.

Thirty years later and more than 20 years after the launch of Net-a-Porter, a significant chunk of luxury shopping has switched to online. By 2025, nearly a fifth of global luxury sales will be digital, according to forecasts by McKinsey, which means fewer opportunities to wield armfuls of branded trophies in the street.

The rise of so-called quiet luxury may make us think twice about doing so anyway. But designer packaging is weirdly persistent.

A curious parallel market has emerged in used luxury product packaging on sites such as eBay, where large paper Céline carriers are listed for about £25 each. According to recent research by the credit broker Money, empty Louis Vuitton boxes sell for an average price of £74. You could argue such a market is absurd, but in satisfying demand, it is entirely rational.

“You’re building a fake history,” says author and record-shop carrier bag collector Jonny Trunk. “But it’s better than a fake history that could fall apart. Or maybe it’s dreaming of eventually buying something in these remarkable temples, of being there. And shrouding a purchase adds mystique.”

Fleury riffs on her consumer fetish themes further in her London exhibition, which coincides with Frieze week and turns out to be an extensive show over several floors, accessed through curtains designed to look like a changing room.

A stack of grey Balenciaga shoe boxes are piled on a windowsill. Stripped of context, they are as drab as the view of the back of Bond Street outside: a building site strewn with Portakabins.

The ludicrously upbeat 1962 track “Telstar” by The Tornados echoes about the galleries. Margaret Thatcher, British prime minister of 1980s middle-class aspiration, once told an interviewer it was her favourite record. (“Subliminal information — I had no idea!” says Fleury.)

But it is that ephemeral luxury packaging that is most unsettling, a psychological prank in London’s most exclusive enclave of branded boutiques.

“I’m not a moralising type and I’m not trying to tell you what to think or what not to think,” says Fleury. “It’s always been like a game I play. But my carrier bags are still having the same effect that they always have.”

Sylvie Fleury: SF is at Sprüth Magers gallery in London until November 4

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