Fashion Musings – Tano Bags

Happy Easter. I hit a wall today after a very long two weeks with no breaks and many late nights, and am currently in bed with magazine, laptop and lots of pillows. I just took a nice long nap and am now browsing purses online. I love purses. It has occurred to me that a reader of this blog would have no way of knowing that considering I rarely talk about them. But I do love them amd recently started thinking about buying a new one. And one of the brands I looked at was Tano Bags – the brand first got my interest back in 2006 and I ultimately purchased one in 2008.

As recently as 2008, it was more of an under-the-radar brand – it had been around for a few years, but very few places carried the whole line (though the online retailer Must Have Bag has carried their line for years). I mostly saw Tano bags in boutiques in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Tano trademark look is distressed semi-shiny Italian leather known as “Crunch” leather and described as having lots of tonal variations, a fairly smooth grain and moderately shiny finish. And the colors are always very vibrant. The picture to the right is a picture of the one I bought last year (hanging on my front door) – the color is called grape and is different than the purple Tano carries this year which is called plum jelly. Isn’t it gorgeous?

At any rate, I love Tano bags and had lots of fun seeing many different ones when I went to the store called, very appropriately, Bag, in Soho. One of the few things I did like, in addition to the luscious colors, reasonable price points (back when I first started to get to know the brand most of their purses were under $200), and good quality leather was the fact that they were not too mainstream.

So, today I was browsing purses and you can magine my complete surprise when I clicked to the Neimans site and saw that Neimans now carries Tano Bags. Granted they only carry a few styles (and oddly enough do not carry the Tano classic bag which is the Bucket Hobo), but it was quite a surprise. I knew Neimans carried Foley and Corinna, which is another of those not-completely mainstream brands, with beautiful handcrafted leather and below usual Neimans pricepoints, so I guess it makes sense. I think it’s a great coup for them to be carried at Neimans, though I still love them for being their own not-completely-mainstream vibe.

Incidentally, I am considering a Tano Boogie Bucket or Shopper or maybe a Foley Mid-City Tote.