When it comes to everyday objects, a supermarket carrier bag could be the ultimate one – a thing we’re more accustomed to squeezing into a drawer or using until it falls apart than giving any special treatment. But these most mundane items are now enjoying something of a new life. On secondhand sites including eBay, Vinted and Depop, old Marks & Spencer carrier bags and those for other supermarkets such as Tesco, Netto and Waitrose are being sold for about £10 – a big mark-up considering they were originally given away for free.
Vinted reports that searches in 2026 have risen by 35% since last year. Once a deeply unremarkable receptacle for the weekly shop, the humble carrier bag has become a bona fide collectors’ item. There’s even an Instagram account dedicated to them - Carry a Bag Man has more than 15,000 followers.
Jeremy Leslie, the founder of MagCulture, a magazine shop in London, sees this as part of a wider trend toward the tangible. These are nostalgic items that take people back to when they were growing up, as a reassuring totem.” If some might balk at the idea of collecting old plastic bags, Tim Sumner is not one of them. He set up the Paper Bag Archive in 2020, and now has more than 3,500 old paper bags plus some plastic ones.
Sumner describes these bags as “great symbols of social history, they track the tastes and flavours of our time across each decade … It’s important to celebrate these insignificant objects; they often create memories that last a lifetime.” The M&S St Michael bag, ubiquitous on high streets throughout the 80s and 90s, is a particularly popular choice now. The label is nostalgic across generations because it was seen on items at the store from 1928 until 2000, but it is also sought by those too young to remember it. It is now central to the store’s latest collaboration – a collection by the cult London streetwear label Aries arriving on 20 August.
It includes a £90 leather tote bag styled to look remarkably like an old St Michael carrier. Lisa Illis, the head of womenswear design at M&S, said: “Turning an everyday carrier bag into a collectable leather accessory perfectly captures what this partnership is about – celebrating the cultural relevance of St Michael while introducing it to a new audience. It takes something deeply familiar and reimagines it through a completely contemporary lens.” Nostalgia is central across the Aries collaboration.
Sofia Prantera, the designer and founder of Aries, says she drew on formative experiences. Single-use plastic bags were phased out at supermarkets in 2015 when a mandatory charge was put in place by the government. By 2023 sales of plastic bags in supermarkets had been reduced by 98%.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
