Getting on the bagwagon

Slinging the bag around town said you were environmentally conscious, intelligently concerned for Mother Earth and so obviously eco-cool you cared not a whit that the bag’s shouty shade of green would never match anything you wore.

Of course, it took only a nano-second – which seems a short yardstick of time, except when you’re measuring the viral spread of fads (and often the longevity of them) – before everybody else jumped on the bagwagon.

Every shop of with even the slightest pretensions to … well, anything in the way of now-ness … had its own branded cloth bag. How environmentally sound all this was is open to question, since most of them were synthetic fabrics spun out of petrochemicals in third world villages where it’s of little concern if the water gets poisoned.

But the continuing popularity of the bags, and the bagwagon, shows that everybody is putting the appearance of trying to be green

Oddly, it has taken until now for Maserati – a name not normally associated with being slow – to join in. But when they do, they certainly take things to the next level.

They’ve just announced their own initiative to save the planet, with a designer eco-bag produced in partnership with Italian fashion house Momaboma. And not only is it a reusable bag that replaces the plastic one – if there are any left in the world by now – but it has the double eco-barrel of also recycling rubbish.

Well, not rubbish in our eyes. But car brochures from the Maserati archives that the company says would otherwise have been pulped.

In the interests of international relations, we’ll just have to suspend disbelief about that claim. However it would be odd to pulp what was obviously a collection of rare archival material that would have collectors salivating onto their white gloves. Especially when a current model Maserati brochure is expecting to get $30 on eBay.

For instance, we can see that one of the pages collaged into a the bag is a 3500GT brochures – an item cited in a story a couple of years ago as being part of an archival treasure, and which noted collector Philip Morrice says would be worth at least $100 in pristine condition.

So we shouldn’t be surprised that the Maser bag is on the market for around $300. Perhaps that’s simply the price of saving the planet.

Or perhaps it reflects the bag’s exclusivity, since only 150 of them have been made. Which means that you’ve got little chance of adding one to your accessory shelf.

Never mind. We’re here to help by pointing the way to your own auto-exotica bag. Simply arm yourself with a pair of scissors and pot of glue, and print out some of the pages from our photo galleries… (may we suggest the Bugatti Bleu Centenaire or perhaps the Porsche 917) … your own eco-bag, and for a lot less than $300.