Hermes Picotin Lock 22 CM Bag Handmade In Taurillon Clemence Leather Gold Hardware 2Z Blue Nuit

Blue Nuit is midnight in the best sense — a blue so dark it has given up asking to be noticed, and exactly right for an evening that keeps moving. In daylight it is clearly, deeply blue; under a restaurant’s warm bulbs it reads as black. It was my first bucket bag, and the format won me over before the colour had a chance to.

Its bucket measures twenty-two centimetres across and twenty-one high, with eighteen centimetres of depth, and that openness is practical in a way zipped bags are not: a phone, keys and a cardholder drop in one-handed, anywhere, without aiming. Nothing spills; the body is deep enough that the contents sit below the rim. Because the sides are soft, it also squeezes under an aeroplane seat when the overhead lockers have given up.

The roulé handles are rolled thick and round, kind to a gloved palm, and the leather tab through the lock at the handle base closes everything with a single pull. Gold hardware glints just enough at night to remind you it is there, and not a flicker more.

Worn with a coat or a dinner jacket, it is the politest dark bag I know. With a dinner jacket it belongs to the evening; with denim it looks borrowed from a mariner.

Honest: dark things vanish inside a dark bag — the single genuine annoyance of Blue Nuit. One pale zip pouch for keys and small changeful things solves it, and should honestly come as standard; it never does.