I don’t care if it’s practical, your bum bag looks revolting

It’s the end of exams and you’re out for a big one tonight. You’ve spent countless hours making sure you look your best.

Tossed four weeks of your food budget away on those new Topshop shoes, contorted your legs round your head fake tanning every last inch of skin, and sweat blood trying to achieve that all too familiar “dewey not sweaty” look with your foundation.
After countless outfit try-ons you take one last look in the mirror, and you’re as pleased with the result as you’ll ever be.

In one swooping, fatal motion, you carefully pick up a bum bag, fill it with essential belongings and attach it round your waist. This is the moment everything falls apart.

Take it off while you still can

In that one second it takes to click the fastener, you’ve undone hours of beauty preparation and outfit deliberation.

This aesthetical monstrosity is infiltrating the accessory scene and spreading through clubs like an aggressive rash. A particularly unattractive sort of rash.

Imagine you’re making a really nice cake: you use the finest flour, organic cocoa and raspberries picked straight from the garden, lovingly take it out of the oven and then instead of your usual buttercream topping, just shit on it instead.

That is the effect of the bum bag.

A key player in festival fashion, your summer profile picture wouldn’t be complete without that, a bindi and some UV paint. Marked as a practical necessity, but little more than jumping on a bandwagon.

What is even less okay is the emergence of the bum bag into regular every day life, allowing it to ruin beautiful clothes and carefully constructed outfits in a mindless statement of how alternative you are.

Five years ago they were reserved for OAP’s holding onto their passports on holiday or people justifiably carrying their EpiPen’s. That is where they should stay.

Now they’ve progressed from a practical essential to a right of passage at house events, if you didn’t get snapped in your bum bag, did you even attend?

Recreational drugs are still absolutely no excuse for this heinous fashion crime.

In this environment, the bum bag is little more than a badge of pride: we know you like MD, you don’t need a bag to prove it. Put it in your bra, or your trainer, or god forbid your clutch bag if you really have to.

Clutch bags are fully functional, easy to fit in your hand, and there’s a variety to complement every outfit ever. And in contrast to the bum bag, or fanny pack as it is also known, you’d struggle to pick one out of a charity shop bargain basket.

Had a big one have we?

They also have zero effect on your mobility in the club, and you’re unlikely to have the same one as your Grandad.

Remember that unlike him you are in the prime of your life: in thirty years time do you really want to be looking back at photos of twenty year old you, adorned by something so ugly?

Probably not, so do the best thing for all of us and don’t let these monstrosities still be a thing this summer.