Shopping alert

neither paper nor plastic: another reason to shop at a.p.c.

May 23, 2008  10:52 am

Birkin, baguette, Paddington: Fashion folk have long been fluent in the language of the It bag. Recently, however, a Not It bag has been anointed. The shopping bag—paper or plastic—has become environmentalists’ villain du jour, and woe betide the consumer parading down the avenue with an armload of throwaway totes advertising where she’s been flashing her plastic. A.P.C. founder Jean Touitou, no sucker, saw this day coming. He’s been stockpiling fabrics from the A.P.C. archive, and as of June 1, anyone who makes a purchase at A.P.C. will take home his or her loot in a reusable tote made from familiar prints. “I hate my old fabrics going to waste,” Touitou says. “I made them and I’m proud of them.” Touitou also puts to rest the tired notion that doing good has got nothing to do with doing good business. It turns out that the square-sided totes, which will come in sizes small, medium, and large, are actually cheaper to produce than the traditional dead-tree A.P.C. bags. As Touitou points out, “What goes around comes around”—and in more ways than one.

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