The Staple - Sandqvist Rucksack

Backpack Pro

It's been awhile, what can I say? Editing PlanetNotion is stealing my days, and my evenings are filled with gigs. I'm not sat around like I was at my old job, surfing the web and reading menswear blogs incessantly. Also, Twitter for me seems to have rendered the blog a little superfluous. But look, it's been six months since I posted anything and I reckon I oughta get back into it. So here I am. There have, it's safe to say, been many Staples over the last six months, but Imma try and be forward-looking rather than retrospective. Best purchase has to go to my rucksack. It was, I'm afraid, a wantonly whimsical purchase from (where else?) Liberty, while on a casual shopping trip with my mate Mark. Rucksacks are obvs all over the shop nowadays, and you can buy a perfectly good one from ASOS. So why splurge? Well in a sea of lookalike Dalston trends, the details are uber-important. On first glance my Sandqvist number might not be the most obviously nice bag, but well, since when did first glance give you the whole picture? Take a closer look (past the dirt if you please); the tan leather straps have aged nicely in six months of near-continuous wear, though the heavyweight black canvas is still as tight as day one. The fastening, a combo of a thick drawstring and two of those rich tan straps tucked into neat tabs is practical if occasionally fiddly, and looks good without recourse to jangly metal hardware. It;s the kind of fastening that only works with precision finishing, which is just the kind of thing Sandqvist do, as Scandinavian connisseurs of design. I'm obvs very much used to it now, but my bag is both widely admired and not often seen on the street; is there a better combo for an item? I've become a big fan of the brand, and this example has accompanied me on trips all over the place; not to go too Tyler Brûlé on your asses, but it's great as airline carry-on too. Anyhoo, I'll not bore you with my ode to a canvas bag. The purpose of this is to highlight what for me makes an item a Staple; it stands out and it's - well, if not individual, every hipster cyclist and their miniature daschund has a rucksack now - of sufficient quality to make the design notable. Look, it's a nice bag, alright? I like nice things...other Staples this week:
Sandqvist canvas rucksack with leather trim
Azari & III's debut album
Home-made cheese scones
The Travel Almanac (magazine)
M&S triple-berry juice
Eley Kishimoto x Orlebar Brown Setter shorts
A nice bottle of rosé from Majestic in Shoreditch