Somewhere between the DR Congo squad walking off a plane in matching leopard print suits and custom bags, Erling Haaland treating this World Cup like a rolling exhibition of his Hermès bag collection, and the sheer size of the Bottega Veneta collection sitting in Jacob Elordi's wardrobe, it became clear that menswear had quietly found its next commercial anchor. This time is neither tailoring nor sneakers, it's the handbag. And this year, from the World Cup to the red carpet, the shift has been impossible to miss.

The World Cup runway

The World Cup has pushed menswear handbags beyond the fashion press and onto front pages. France's squad arrived carrying a small museum of French leather goods, Hermès HAC Birkins, a Chanel x Pharrell Williams XXL flap bag on Marcus Thuram, a Louis Vuitton x Murakami Keepall on Désiré Doué.

Norway's Erling Haaland turned his airport arrivals into his own recurring Hermès segment. And Democratic Republic of Congo, back at the World Cup for the first time in 52 years, arrived in custom suits and matching leopard print bags designed by Congolese designer Alvin Junior Mak, one of the tournament's most talked about arrivals. Even Lamine Yamal, eighteen and already the most watched player in the tournament, was pictured carrying a Chanel shopping tote in calfskin and tweed, not styled for a campaign.

The handbag, a category historically filed under womenswear, showed up at the World Cup, one of mainstream culture's most masculine-coded events, without controversy, a clearer sign of mainstream acceptance than another styled campaign.

A slump with one exception

Leather goods and accessories remain the category most houses cannot afford to lose, and have taken up an increasing share of luxury revenue globally in recent years. That matters because the market has spent the past two years in a genuine slump: the customer base has shrunk from 400 million people in 2022 to around 340 million now, luxury share prices fell roughly 8 percent in January alone, and international tourist spending in Europe dropped 20 percent year over year in February.

Bain's spring 2026 update puts personal luxury goods spending at 358 billion euros last year, and shows leather goods actually contracted again in 2025, hit by years of price increases without matching product newness. The encouraging sign is that the market is slowly recovering: the report puts 2026 growth at 2 to 4 percent, reaching between 365 and 373 billion euros, up from that 358 billion euro base, and part of that recovery is coming from smaller-ticket leather accessories like the handbag, priced below apparel but still enough of a statement piece to hold its own. Which is exactly why menswear has become the place brands are testing whether the category can be rebuilt from a different angle entirely.

The proof is not subtle

Searches for "mens handbag" are up 637 percent year over year, according to Google Trends analysis by The Data Fashion Brief, already outpacing every runway silhouette tracked this season. Also from a brand campaign perspective, at Louis Vuitton, Jackson Wang fronted the latest Speedy campaign, the bag shown open and mid-use rather than staged; at Givenchy and Valentino, both houses have pushed new bag silhouettes into their menswear lineups this year, treating the accessory as core product rather than afterthought, and there are rumours that Chanel may launch their own menswear line.

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The men not waiting for permission

The same pattern shows up off the runway too, in the men actually wearing it. Jacob Elordi has been a Bottega Veneta ambassador since carrying multiple handbags off-duty over the past year. A$AP Rocky became a Chanel ambassador in November 2025 despite the house still having no standalone menswear line, and he has since carried its bags at nearly every public appearance. Pedro Pascal followed him into the Chanel ambassador seat this April, after months of being photographed in the house's pieces. None of these men were dressed by committee, and that is precisely what makes the pattern worth tracking. These ambassadorships reflect the growing shift away from traditional menswear and womenswear categories (click to read more).

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The numbers behind the bag

According to The Data Fashion Brief's analysis on the SS27 menswear season, handbags showed up in 15 percent of all looks across the season's top 11 houses*. That figure hides how concentrated it actually is: 96 percent of looks at Thom Browne, 81 percent at Louis Vuitton, 36 percent at Simone Rocha, and 33 percent at Celine. Search backs up what the runway was already showing: "mens handbag" is up 637 percent year over year, peaking at its highest ever index in early May, up from a baseline that was close to nothing the year before.

*Methodology: The Data Fashion Brief built an AI-assisted tool that scans every look from the menswear SS27 collections and tags it by garment type, fit, fabric, colour, and detail. Each trend is measured two ways: how dominant it is within a single designer's own collection, and how present it is across the whole season. The houses covered: Hermès, Celine, Dior, Saint Laurent, Ralph Lauren, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Givenchy, Acne Studios, Simone Rocha and Thom Browne.

Other SS27 menswear trends: a broader shift toward softer silhouettes

That handbag data sits inside a much larger dataset covering every major menswear trend this season, and the comparison against those categories is where the scale of the shift becomes clearer. Straight leg trousers led the season, 36 percent of all menswear SS27 looks had this type of trouser, and search for the term is up 326 percent year over year. Wide leg trousers followed at 22 percent, up 218 percent in search, and skinny trousers made up 9 percent of looks, largely concentrated at Prada.

Skirts and dresses on men made up 3 percent of everything shown on the runway, seen almost entirely at Thom Browne and Simone Rocha and close to invisible everywhere else. On volume alone, that reads like a niche, house-specific signature. Then look at search: a year ago, "pleated skirt men" barely registered any searches. It is now a real, measurable term with its own visible pattern across the full year, and measured against every other candidate on the same scale, it dominates completely, peaking at the maximum possible index while every trouser search term stayed close to flat.

Sheer tops told the same story at a smaller scale, just 1 percent of everything tagged this season, on volume alone barely a signal, but consistent enough across three separate houses, Prada, Dior, and Simone Rocha. At Prada and Dior, several pieces were labelled sheer blouse and sheer mesh top instead of just shirt, even though nothing prompted that choice. The tool reached for feminine-coded language entirely on its own. Search backs the direction, if not yet the scale, the same near-zero-to-real pattern as pleated skirts.

Bags, skirts, and sheer are three readings of the same instrument, pointed at the same shift: menswear this season is measurably more feminine-coded than at any point The Data Fashion Brief has tracked it. More than half of Gen Z consumers already say they prefer brands that offer gender-neutral options, a third have already bought from gender-fluid collections, and the unisex apparel market is projected to grow from under 12 billion dollar (approx. 10.5 billion euro) in 2024 to more than 60 billion dollar (approx. 52 billion euro) by 2033. The handbag category is where that shift has found its most expensive expression, the point where fashion meets commerce.

What this means for fashion insiders

From there, expect the houses that move first on formal menswear bag lines, not just accessorising existing campaigns with them, to be the ones best placed to capture the category before it gets crowded. And expect the next several seasons to keep pulling softer, more traditionally feminine silhouettes, skirts, sheer, unstructured bags, further into the mainstream menswear assortment rather than treating them as a single loud season.

Whether this becomes the thing that pulls leather goods out of its slump, or the loudest evidence yet that gendered categories in fashion were always more convention than rule, the direction is the same. Menswear is no longer the quiet half of the industry waiting for permission to be interesting, and the data caught up with it.