The Herschel backpack: how Generation Y carries capitalism's mythologies
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Version 0 of 1. Was a law passed recently that mandated every person under 30 own one of those blue and brown Herschel backpacks? How else can we explain how ubiquitous they are? Step onto a university campus and 90% of the students will be wearing one, seemingly in defiance of the laws of supply and demand. @marrowing @adambrereton pic.twitter.com/kWbkZkmgXN The Herschel trend is fascinating. In 2014 the Guardian’s Paula Cocozza went digging for the source of the bags’ popularity. Brothers Lyndon and Jamie Cormack, both apparel industry veterans, founded the company in 2009 because they “did not feel there was a very compelling story being told about bags”. They named the company after Herschel, a tiny town in Saskatchewan where their great-grandparents settled after emigrating from Scotland in 1906. “We as kids got to go back there all the time. Just used to wander the hills, shoot bottles, maybe the occasional gopher,” says Lyndon Cormack. Cocozza points out that this association with exploration, frontiers, beards, maps, etc. is very now, and the Herschel, with its vintage feel and pointless utilitarian flourishes (the little diamond-shaped leather leather badge is actually a lashtab), is designed to play on aesthetic themes that reject mass production in favour of the vintage, handcrafted and self-reliant. In other words, the Herschel backpack is a bag for the rugged individual. The Cormacks’ decision to craft the brand around their homesteading great-grandparents is not an accident: homesteading is a crucial mythology of capitalism. It’s the supposed process by which previously un-owned natural resources come to be validly possessed by one individual, who is then allowed to defend them using force and transfer ownership through contract. Put most famously by John Locke, homesteading is central to anarcho-capitalism, rights-based libertarianism, and propertarianism. It is amazing, and in some ways perfect, to see this individualistic ideology clearly reflected in the marketing of a backpack that is made in 15 factories in China and adorns the shoulders of every second young person in the Western world. @adambrereton @marrowing Colleague: "This is very awkward, Rohan" pic.twitter.com/DX8GWp8BuE I doubt the Cormacks intended it this way, but as master marketers they know which stories appeal to people. At this point in history, homesteading, exploration and frontiersmanship are it. The material conditions in which the backpack exists – in which it is actually manufactured and worn – reflect the reality of global capitalism. It’s made by factory workers and worn by precariously-employed inner-city knowledge workers – journalists, designers, and students. It is not worn while traversing a mountain in search of a hitherto-unknown gold deposit, or while fishing ruggedly in a pristine lake. But that’s story that its designers have woven in order to make the bag attractive to millions of urbanites: a repudiation of their lifestyle as students and employees. And everybody loves it, because, as John Steinbeck may or may not have said about the American poor, they see themselves “not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires”. This sentiment doesn’t just exist in America any more, but Australia as well. When I first started to notice Herschel backpacks a couple of years ago, I thought their slightly childish simplicity and drab brownness made the young men who wore them look like orphans. Now that they are so pervasive, they’re a constant reminder of the weight on my generation’s shoulders of the myths we must shrug off. |