We’re living through an era of peak designer/brand collaborations, and yet the level of excitement around the new Baggu collection with the New York label Collina Strada has reached a fever pitch—which has caught Collina Strada’s own Hillary Taymour off-guard. “I went to the grocery store in my neighborhood—it’s a grocery store that’s been there for 35 years—and the woman working the check-out was like ‘How do you have the Collina Strada Baggu collab?’” Taymour recalled, incredulously. “The reach has been incredible.”
It’s not the designer’s first time joining forces with the kings of the reusable bags. Back in 2019, she staged her spring 2020 show on a Manhattan street turned farmer’s market, and left a Collina Strada-branded Baggu back on each seat so that attendees could “shop” the stalls after the show had ended. The collection pulls from the brand’s archival prints, including its famous “spiky puppy” from fall 2023, and the “Sistine tomato” from resort 2020, which was the “first real print” Taymour created with her frequent collaborator Charlie Engman. “We spent four to six weeks working on that print, it’s all real photos that Charlie took and then we put them together ourselves,” she said. The prints appear on everything from the classic Baggu shopping bags and zipper pouches, to more unexpected summer-ready styles like a pop-up tent, roll-up picnic blanket, and even towels. But the crown jewel of the collaboration is undoubtedly the most Collina Strada of them all—a bag shaped like a horse.
Surprisingly, the idea originated with the Baggu team. “They pitched it to me,” Taymour explained. “I think they saw the pony piñata bag that I did and they wanted to try it; they showed me a prototype and I was like, ‘This is sick!’” “We wanted to experiment and do something fun for this collab,” said Kara Szczech, Baggu’s head of product. “Collina had a pony bag in their line which we really loved but we wanted more of an everyday animal bag if that’s, like, even a thing.” One of the bag’s cooler design details is that the tail turns into the shoulder strap. “I truly love Stacy—that’s what the design team calls the Horse bag—it’s probably the best bag Baggu has ever made,” Szchech added. The real Baggu heads will likely be excited about the tonal strap on the horse, and the goth horse girls will be excited to learn the bag comes in all-black. “I wanted to do different colorways so anyone could find something they liked,” Taymour said. “We also have a black bag that just has a nice silver hardware detail—it’s one of our belt buckles now—but it’s something that I hand-drew and created and it can still say ‘fashion’ but it’s also very subtle.”
