Marc Jacob?s Designs Bloomingdale?s Holiday 2004 Shopping Bag

Bloomingdale's iconic 'Brown Bag' has been joined by the Holiday 2004 Shopping Bag created by designer Marc Jacobs. The bags creative direction is inspired by happy partygoers at fabulous parties with smiling red lips and toothy smiles with the side of the bag reading 'Happy Bloomingdale's'.

'We wanted something that was festive but in a non-religious and non-traditional way. The big smiles, the red lips with the green bag, seemed the perfect way to achieve that', said Marc Jacobs.

Prior to the Holiday 2004 bag the most recent development was the 'Happening in Soho' bag honouring the opening of Bloomingdale's second location in New York City. The Soho shopping Bag was designed with Warhol-like, black-on-neon green cropped photo of the stores facade.

In 1922, years before there were such things as shopping bags, Bloomingdale's printed a special fiftieth anniversary message to its customers on the face of its small brown paper bags. It was far from great art, but it was the birth of a signature icon, the Bloomingdale brown bag.

The shopping bag we use today, expansive paper sacks with strong twisted handles, weren't manufactured until the mid-1950's, and Bloomingdale's adopted one in 1954. The design was pleasantly innocuous: a rose on one side, a gloved hand with an umbrella on the other, and the store's old-fashioned script signature. With slight variations, this design was used throughout the fifties. It changed color each year and, at Christmas, the rose and umbrella were replaced with a sprig of evergreen and a candy cane.

In 1961, Bloomingdale's held the first of its storewide import fairs, as they were then known, and commissioned a special shopping bag for the occasion. The French tarot-card design, which flagrantly omitted the stores name, became the first in a long series of designer bags that raised the medium to a level of fine art. The bags were an instant hit. Most did not include Bloomingdale's name, but there was no question from which store they had come. For the next three decades, artists, photographers, graphic designers, and even fashion designers created the bags. Most bags were seasonal. Some came back for repeat performances. And specific departments within the store used some bags. Examples of these bags can be seen to this day in museum collections around the world.

The most famous bag of all - the legendary Big Brown Bag - first hit the streets in 1973. It seemed that the linen department needed a really big bag to hold the increasingly larger and more luxurious pillows and blankets that were becoming popular. The Little Brown Bag followed naturally a year later, for cosmetics and accessories. The final member of today's trio, the Medium Brown Bag, that was also added in 1974.

Photos of todays brown bags can be seen in Bloomingdale's stores nationwide adorning hallways, elevator lobbies, and executive office areas; proof that the shopping bag is no longer simply utilitarian, but an art form and marketing tool in itself. In November of 1998, the most famous shopping bags in the world added the Bloomingdale's website address: www.bloomingdales.com.

Bloomingdale's, a division of Federated Department Stores, was founded in 1872 and currently operates 33 stores in New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, Illinois, Minnesota, Florida, California and Georgia. For website access, log on to bloomingdale's.com.