Weekender Bags And The Luxury of Escape

The man who would act as my companion drove a Subaru. When he arrived at my mother’s house, she fed him cereal, and I popped the trunk. Piled into the car, my things seemed like a random collection of objects. His were belongings, and packed appropriately: into a waxed weekender bag, and within it, a dopp kit. Both were monogrammed with his initials. His mother owned three homes––he was used to getting away.

Throughout our trip, I would often ask him to repeat the word “dopp.” The routine was stupid, but it wasn’t a game. The word sounded too similar to other words I knew and spoke––mop, drop, flop––to be so unfamiliar; I was convinced he had made it up. (The real etymology is boring and proprietary: “Dopp” is derived from Dopplet, the surname of the craftsman who designed the original kit in 1926, after which it became popular among soldiers during the first and second world wars. Eventually, “dopp kit” and “toiletry bag” came to be synonymous.)

Every language begins as a grouping of neologisms, but the vocabulary used to market luxury objects is particularly apocryphal. In a survey of the best travel luggage, Refinery29 identifies weekender bags as the key to “surviving” long weekends. In a similar survey, Travel Away describes them as “insanely practical,” featuring a $640 leather garment bag designed by Hook & Albert. It holds only two suits (“or cocktail dresses”) and a single pair of shoes. Practically, it’s insane.

Fashion objects are always tethered to the lifestyles of those who purchase them. The variable is whether that lifestyle is achieved or aspirational––profit margins, after all, are always dependent on an advertiser’s ability to inspire wishful thinking. The hawking of weekender bags is particularly trite. The name refers both to the thing and the person who touts it, as if the identity of each were contingent on the acquisition of the other; the bag’s signature shape is designed to mimic the contours of an airplane overhead compartment. For as low as $299, the subtext can become text: Forestbound, a New England-based bag company, has an entire line of weekenders stitched with the bag’s implicit fantasy in thick, obvious script: “ESCAPE”.

But what do “weekenders,” a population of professionals with a staggering per capita rate of second-home ownership, need to escape from? In the months since state and federal governments began to recognize the spread of COVID-19 as a threat, and rushed to compel residents, both housed and unhoused, to shelter-in-place, tens of thousands of weekenders have fled their city dwellings in favor of “the country,” that glimmering, forever frontier whose allure is piqued by its amenities––mountains, fresh air––but flourishes from its lack: emptiness and open space.

In New York, a quantum computing CEO moved his wife and their Havanese puppy from Crown Heights, Brooklyn to a rental house in Litchfield, Connecticut; in an interview with the New York Post, he compared the estate to Versailles. Meanwhile, a textile tycoon living in Manhattan moved his family into an 11-bedroom rental in Bridgehampton. The home is outfitted with a hot tub, outdoor kitchen, and roof-top golf course, and has previously housed Justin Bieber, Beyoncé, and Jay Z. He is paying just under $2 million for the short-term rental, which runs through Labor Day, making it the most expensive real estate in East End, a region that contains eight towns and only one hospital, with a paltry eight ICU beds and four quarantine rooms.

As wealthy people continue to criss-cross state and county lines in search of semi-permanent settlement, locals have urged their governments to restrict movement. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti announced that residents were forbidden from traveling to their second homes. In Rhode Island, members of the National Guard went door to door to warn out-of-state residents to self-quarantine for two weeks upon arrival. Some counties in Hudson Valley have urged homeowners to remove their listings from AirBnB; the site still advertises more than 300 single-occupancy homes available for June. (Meanwhile, similar efforts to monitor travel into tribal land have been thwarted by state governments; South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, who has refused to issue a stay-at-home order for state residents, has demanded that the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe and Oglala Sioux Tribe remove highway checkpoints designed to prevent the spread of COVID-19 into their communities.)

As Jedidiah Britton-Purdy wrote in a recent review for the Nation, “every open frontier eventually arrives at its end, the place where it turns into a closed border.” But for rich Americans, border-crossing remains a minor inconvenience; the refuge they seek, after all, isn’t from persecution or even poor health, but from the pesky qualities of city life. Invoking overcrowded hospitals, choked supply chains, and diminished public infrastructure, they make their case for asylum. But the conditions they flee are rarely the ones they face. For those who can afford access to private insurance, replenishable groceries, housing, and second housing, these tragedies are rarely experienced as anything but a series of improbable nuisances. Together they comprise the impoverished quality of life that wealthy New Yorkers so rarely feel, but also helped create.

Gentrifiers don’t always share a tax bracket with the rich, but they do tend to share a pathological overestimation of the importance of their own needs. How many of them speak regularly of their desires for iced coffee, granite countertops, same-day delivery, etc., as if they were the unfortunate but irresistible accoutrement of living the good life? I once knew a white artist who would confess, at parties, apropos of nothing, that she lived “deep” in Crown Heights. She felt guilty, I assumed, and didn’t know what to do with her bad feelings, so parroted her street address as if it were her cross to bear. She had a strange relationship with her super, like something out of a Miranda July novel. He called her “Miss”, and fixed anything she wanted. One morning, as she was leaving her building, she sent him a text with an implicit request: “There’s a person sleeping in the lobby. I thought you’d like to know.”

Gentrification, which is often described as an inevitable phenomenon but is more often experienced as a concerted attack, has frayed the binds that might otherwise enable communities to provide mutual support––not only during a pandemic, but also during the quotidian emergencies of everyday life: displacement, evictions, deportations, hunger, imprisonment. In metropolitan cities around the world, developers and local governments have conspired to ensure that their wealthiest constituents feel a higher investment in private property than they do in human life. In Manhattan, nearly half of the luxury condos built since 2015 are vacant. Meanwhile, Governor Cuomo, who has consistently refused to make a comprehensive plan to provide shelter and food to New York City’s 70,000 unhoused residents, insists that the sight of people sleeping on subways is “disgusting,” and has deployed NYPD to disperse them.

Since the global spread of COVID-19, it’s become common sense that our personal health is enmeshed with the health of others; if it wasn’t clear already, it is now. But it’s a selfish trick to take from that formulation––and from the imperative to stay inside––that the best way to care for others is to care for yourself. For every New Yorker who flees, I suspect there’s one who organizes. If I try to count on two hands the number of New York City-based mutual aid organizations facilitating food delivery, picking up prescriptions, and bailing people out of jail, I run out of fingers––which is to say nothing of the organizers who have been doing this work long before we were living in a federally-recognized crisis, or the people who continue to provide support to their family, friends, and neighbors through quiet acts of redistribution.

Since the beginning of March, the U.S. has deported nearly 20,000 immigrants. In that same time period, 40% of residents in New York’s wealthiest neighborhoods have left their primary residences. How many more will continue to travel upstate and out west, invoking the political necessity for open borders between their two homes? Rich people have always shrouded their personal plights in the language of disenfranchisement. Were it not for the entrenchment of their material counterparts, the metaphors that give meaning to luxury would be impotent: in an emergency, accomplices will always try to feel like victims. But so long as “escape” remains a branding slogan, and “survival” a matter of packing the right bag, getting better will never involve getting out. There are no dead metaphors, only duplicitous ones.

Maya Binyam is a writer living in New York. She's a senior editor of Triple Canopy and an editor of The New Inquiry.