This Bag Will Not Make Your Arm Fall Off

I'm the first to admit that a purse is a very personal subject. Some women like status bags and spend big bucks. Some like a huge bag for schlepping their complicated lives around. Some of us would like some style, and would like some quality, but would rather not handicap either our bank accounts or our bodies for it.

This very functional bag comes in primary colors and classic brown, too!

I've been hauling around this medium sized bag all summer. It's from a lesser known cult brand, it's white, and it holds a lot. It really holds too much. I know this because my arm started to hurt from hauling it around. Yet, when I looked inside it, I realized that I don't need half the crap that's in there. It was just ridiculous, the amount of loose change and extra glasses and loose receipts I had rattling around in there. The only solution, I decided, was to force myself to downsize. One smallish cross body bag should do the trick.

I found this bag at Coach, of all places. Yeah, I know... it's our mother's purse store, even though I realize it's tried to be more stylish for years. In a way, Coach's striving for hipness made it even stodgier; it was trying so, so hard. This Legacy line, however, is different. They went back to the '70s, to the archives, for classic, streamlined bags. Then they added new colors and, like the one I purchased, color blocking. Somehow, this bag is transformed from stodgy to classically ironic. Although it holds only the essentials (a wallet, a phone, some keys), I've been managing just fine without carting around the contents of a filing cabinet.

At about $278, this bag is a bit over the Toad maximum, but not by much. And, for a quality bag that will probably never truly be out of style, it seems like a bit of a bargain. At Coach.