Collection of One: The O'Hare Tote
A Truly Potent Toteable
We’ve been traveling a lot these past few weeks (for 3 late summer weddings and a family birthday party). Since August we’ve traversed the redwood forests of Humboldt County, taken up residence under the stars and among the chaparral and boulder fields in San Ramon, dined al fresco in a fragrant native garden in the Bay Area, and finally sharpened our family travel bona fides on the great, pitiless whetstone of New York (a city I love to visit, but I’m always happy to return home and leave behind that specific feeling of mutilated urban blight; a green, farm rooftop wedding helped, but our Brooklyn hotel had an entire wall festooned with plastic bougainvillea). All this plane, train, trolley, bus and ferry travel found me reaching for a familiar bag. Please enjoy this brief photo essay on the WANT Les Essentiels O’Hare Shopping Tote.
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I. The Gateway Collab
At the top, I can concede that I own a good number of bags (funny how these “Collection of One” features have started to stray into showcasing my favorite thing in a given category, rather than staying limited to a smaller sampling where I’ve committed to purchasing only one thing). None of this means we we can’t look at one of my favorite bags.1
The O’Hare bag from WANT Les Essentials debuted in 2012 (following four years of observation and research and named after Chicago’s airport, using the same naming convention as other bags from the company). The designers, Dexter and Byron Peart, are twins from Montreal and they represent something I love in makers: a kind of generosity in talking about their designs and providing an abundance of context, backstory and philosophy for why they’ve made something. A great product stands on its own, but it also becomes something nearly transcendent when the ideas behind the thing are made plain.
Asked about their inspiration for their bag in 2013, the Peart brothers cited Habitat 67 (their home in Montreal where every unit has a garden, which also premiered as part of the 1967 Montreal World Expo) and Dieter Rams’ Ten Principles of Good Design. If you want to support designers who have thought this long and hard about the objects they put into the world, WANT Les Essentials is hard to beat.2
The WANT Les Essentiels bag came onto my radar as many things did back in those days: GQ. They ran a quick feature (April, 2011) on a collaboration the makers had undertaken with Orlebar Brown (the swim trunks that are famously made from 60 separate components like a piece of tailoring, with a price point to match). I then ordered this combo from Mr. Porter in February of 2012 ($395 back then, but the trunks and bag would be over double that today), along with an Andros dive watch from J. Crew ($175, also in navy).3
For a few glorious summers I was bedecked in expensive navy beach trappings.4 This bag was a kind of beach variant of the O’Hare tote, as its internal pockets were made of mesh, perfect for sunscreen and other objects covered in sand. Otherwise it was the same organic cotton, two toned metal zipper, vegetable tanned leather and all-around superiorly-finished bag as the flagship model.
II. Slow Fashion
In 2024, this bag is now on its third life. Initially this was my bag for law school and work (where it could easily hold a water bottle, laptop in a sleeve, notebooks and other miscellaneous items in the 4 interior pockets). I also purchased a non-beach variant of this bag when the original began to look a bit too distressed for the office.
Both bags served as diaper bags in 2020 with the arrival of our son. They have also served as a kind of helmet bag—it holds a bike lock and other items needed when I’m cycling and can be conveniently slung across the back like a messenger bag while riding. It also fits under the seat in front of you on an airplane, and those four interior pockets allow you to (eventually) find the things you need at hand.
III. Fade to Blue
The navy coloring on the bag also does something that (maybe only) I love. I yet run across anyone else that loves when a dark blue article starts to take on a bleached, almost purple appearance. It’s something I actively seek out for things I own in navy (I purposely left our cybex stroller out in the sun to get this bleaching effect on its canopy and other sections). As the next photo shows, my first bag has so much sun bleaching on it now that it’s starting to transition into a kind of gray-beige.
The original 2012 bag has also held up incredibly well in terms of structural integrity. This bag has spent a lot of time on the ground and the base has only moderate wear in the fabric.
The handles likewise show a considerable amount of wear, but nothing that can’t be mended (and I prefer the bit of rope showing through on this older version for now).
And finally here are some shots of the newer bag during our recent family travels. It looks quite at home in the United Lounge at LAX.
The size of the bag is also perfect for hanging it off the back of a travel stroller—here it is during a Golden Gate Band concert in San Francisco.
It’s truly an incredible bag and the kind of object that deserves celebrating. As I mentioned in opening, I have other bags, but none of them perform the role better than this one from WANT.
When asked about their line of products back in 2014 by The Montreal Gazette, the Peart brothers also emphasized that they see themselves as part of the “slow fashion” movement (buy fewer, better things, etc. and it’s almost rote today, but I think they were visionary by the standards of 2014). With both of their bags still going strong 10 years later, they’ve succeeded in that regard.
IV. Internet Bycatch
Once again we dump out our trawling net on the Sublime Prosaic deck for inspection and edification.
I’m always a sucker for Blancpain’s involvement in ocean conservation and Cousteau-styled expeditions. They’ve announced the winners of their 2024 underwater photography awards. It might not inspire you to buy a watch, but we have to settle for this kind of content when the BBC (rightly) takes years to release their marquee nature documentaries and a Discovery Channel that bothered with nature programming died decades ago.
Peter Buchanan Smith, founder of BestMade Co (you might remember them for selling axes and camping mugs to white collar office workers in the 2010s), has bought the company back from Tanner Goods and is working on the relaunch. Hope springs eternal.
Wellema Hat Co, a charming hattery nestled in the foothills of Southern California, continues to delight with their series What is a Hat? With a trip to Santa Fe coming up in October, I really enjoyed this look at Chris Ferguson, who owns a gallery in Taos.
Hodinkee highlighted this watch in its coverage of Geneva Watch Days 2024. A charming thought experiment of what a regatta timing watch would look like if one was release in the 1930s, this is the Albishorn x Massena LAB Maxigraph.
This YouTube video is dumb, but it found me at the right time in the middle of an ennui-inducing work day. Sopranos X Star Trek.
Football returning always makes me feel that it’s grilling season. With that, playlists can relax and allow you to return to old favorites, as the pressure is off to keep surfacing the newest/latest/greatest summer releases. For your audio consideration at your next asado:
As a quick aside, Monocle and The New Yorker and public radio know exactly what they are doing when they offer a free tote bag with a subscription or donation—your bag is an under appreciated way to show the world your point of view. My Monocle (a NATO military kit bag) and New Yorker (basic but iconic) bags are good enough that other people in my household (our nanny included) regularly end up stealing taking them.
They also make one of my favorite (discontinued) wallets, the Kennedy with money clip.
The Timex for J. Crew Andros Dive Watch also debuted in 2012 and was so dear to me that I ultimately had to replace it with a Blancpain Fifty Fathoms years later. Seiko 5s and other dive watches never really did it for me after the Andros (which I left in a Las Vegas hotel room), not that that stopped me from trying.
Can’t be sure what happened to the towel, but I still have the bag. The trunks were worn long enough to finally split along one of the seams, at which point I upgraded to another pair of OB trunks in navy (with gold hardware and with less chlorine fading, which had gotten fairly extreme by then).