| Ah, the Pashli, arguably 3.1 Phillip Lim’s most popular and recognizable – dare I say it - ‘It Bag’ (*cringe*). But please believe me when I say that this, for once, was not one of my fashion victim purchases. |
| On the contrary, I’ve been quietly (or perhaps, not so quietly) stalking this bag since it’s appearance in 3.1 Phillip Lim’s Fall 2011 collection. And then old PL took it up a notch when he introduced the mini Pashli 2012, and StyledOn.com declared that there were more Pashli’s at New York Fashion Week than models! I vividly remember that going-no-where conversation I roped Maria from Crashing Red into on Twitter last year, about the various merits of the two respective sizes. Then this year 3.1 Phillip Lim bridged that final gap between the incredibly big and the incredibly small, with the new medium Pashli, hailed by the PurseBlog as Goldilock’s preferred bowl of porridge. As much as I love the epic work of Mr Lim, I must say I have a major bone to pick. Why, I ask, did there have to be so much choice? You might criticize my close-mindedness, but surely the obviously superior choice is black, and the only reason people choose other colours is purely for the sake of standing out a little bit. Or perhaps, it’s so, upon procuring the obviously superior choice of black, you can look back at all the other irrelevant colours and savour a sense of satisfaction that you’d gotten ‘the best’. Finally, after three years of self mutterings, sleepless nights, and general faffing around (Danae, I hate you for teaching me this phrase!), the bag is finally mine in the physical sense. All is forgiven. It was worth the wait. My final choice was the current season mixed media Nubuck and Croc embossed which is all about texture. I still have residual lust for the classic shark embossed version. It’s crazy how a simple change of finish can change the look completely. Where the shark embossed is architectural and modern, the mixed media has something of an old school luxe feel to it, almost like the Pashli for the sensible adult. I couldn’t put it better than Suzie Lau of Style Bubble’s take on the bag: “the zippers zip good, the clasp clasps good, the handle handles good” – the Pashli is a practically overall good bag, with no bits that aren’t meant to be there, and nothing added that needn’t have been. Not that I expected anything different. I’d studied the bag so extensively that I almost needed no further investigation of the actual merchandise (and in that way the grand unpacking was somewhat anti-climatic). The one thing that did throw me was the apparent size of the Pashli. There’s something deceptive about it, perhaps due to some kind of size perception illusion created by its generous double handles and expandable wings. Set out in front of you, it looks conservatively small (somewhat disappointingly), making you think the mini Pashli must really be incredibly small. Once you put it against the body it suddenly looks oversized, which makes you think the regular sized Pashli must be enormous. And yet, the difference between the sizes is a mere 3 inches either way. I wonder, would it be wrong to get one in each size? |
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