My favorite thing about Halloween is the dogs. Our neighbors on the Upper East Side hand out dog treats in addition to candy for the kids. Weekends in October are filled with Halloween parties and parades for dogs—this year, we had the honor of witnessing bacon, egg, and cheese on an everything beagle (!). We’re not dressing up, because poor Artemis has to model for A&A all year, so she gets to be a dog today.
Still, I carry Halloween year round with my Fendi Bag Bugs (aka Monster) tote. The first Fendi Bag Bugs accessory emerged in 2013 as a fluffy keychain with cute yet menacing eyes hanging off the bags on the runway. By 2016, there was a full Fendi Bag Bugs collection—watches, backpacks, shoes, and more, all featuring the iconic playful monster face, which has become a Rorschach test for my interactions. “Your bag is mad at me,” strangers often tell me. (Usually men tapping me on the shoulder.) Is it mad at you, or is it, perhaps, just trying to protect itself by terrifying you? Or maybe that’s just my bag’s face—Resting Monster Face.
You can understand why I was pleased to discover with these Mr. Dog New York Roboto Poop Bag Holders. Are you scared of poop? There was a time, before I adopted Artemis, when I would flinch upon seeing dog poop. Intellectually, I knew that poop was part of every day life. Emotionally, it was gross. And then I got a puppy who got diarrhea all over her bed the first night she came home, and suddenly, I became very pragmatic about poop. You clean it up, you wash your hands, you do it again. As with most scary things in life, the mystery fades away with repetition. Might as well do in style.
The Mr. Dog New York Roboto Poop Bag Holders were inspired by the Fendi collection and are made of sturdy hand-cut leather and can fit three standard rolls of poop bags. They’re proudly Brooklyn-made by a local craftsman and have a solid brass lobster clasp as hardware—it’s heavy and luxe. To refill your poop bags, you unzip the mouth (just like the Fendi Bag Bugs) and pull the bags through the solid brass grommet at the bottom (not like the Fendi Bag Bugs). In other words, they’re functional—let’s remember what they’re made for.
You can hang them as keychains off your own bag and they won’t look out of place. They’re $130 each, but compared to the OG Fendi keychain ($690, if you’re in the market), that’s a bargain.
Photography by Tayler Smith