Both are huge, bright blue and have two pairs of handles of different sizes, which allow you to modulate how the weight is carried. One is the famous Frakta, the bag that costs 50 cents at IKEA and that everyone has had at home, and the other is the new Balenciaga tote bag, made of leather and priced at 1,700 euros. Any resemblance between the two is not entirely coincidental, as Demna Gvasalia, the luxury brand's creative director for just over a year, is an expert at spotting popular culture icons and using them to provoke and ask questions about what should be be luxury. His last viral bag was another oversize bag – another house brand – very similar from afar to the less than one euro rayon bags that are used to carry clothes and that originate in Thai markets. The Balenciaga version cost about 2,000 euros. Before that, Gvasalia launched briefcases in the image and likeness of those used to store cheap blankets.
For all these actions, which border on performance, such as when he put imitations of his own brand, Vetements, on sale alongside the original garments, or when he alters the proportions so that everything looks giant or damaged in the dryer, some say that Gvasalia is trolling the fashion world, while others defend him as a true visionary. Whatever it is, the Georgian-born designer, who studied at Antwerp's famous fashion school and worked for the firm of Martin Margiela, to whom he is often compared, knows exactly what he has to do to make headlines. like the one in this article.
His Arena Bag isn't made from tough polypropylene like IKEA's but from crinkled, polished leather, but its cut is undeniably similar. The funny thing is that the iconic Frakta's days are numbered. Last year, the Swedish multinational asked the Danish design agency Hay to redesign its bag and they delivered a visually more elegant prototype, but with less impact, in tan and green.
The new bag has a long way to go to become as ubiquitous and recognizable as the blue one. Artist Adriana Valdez Young declared her "an icon of our global lifestyle and the excess consumption that it implies." She therefore uses them in her work, turning them into dresses, and, when she moved from New York to London a few years ago, she decided to get rid of all her possessions except what would fit in two Fraktas. In the film El porvenir, by Mia Hansen-Love, the Frakta also has a few seconds of prominence. When the protagonist, Isabelle Huppert, throws the flowers that her adulterous husband has given her into an Ikea bag, she later returns to retrieve her bag. It is one thing to end a marriage of more than 30 years and quite another to lose a perfectly useful bag.
