Hermes Lindy 26 CM Bag Handmade In Taurillon Clemence Leather Gold Hardware 18 Etoupe

Ask five people to describe Etoupe and you will get five answers: grey, taupe, putty, mushroom, greige. That ambiguity is why it works – the colour borrows from whatever it is worn against, so one bag behaves like five.

My Lindy 26 in Etoupe, with gold hardware on Clemence’s pebbled grain, has been in near-constant rotation since spring. Twenty-six by eighteen by twelve centimetres covers a wallet, phone, keys, sunglasses and a pouch of small things, and the soft body folds against the hip on the strap. The warm hardware keeps the taupe from going sombre.

The details still charm me: the rolled handles that rest like a small parcel in the hand, the side pockets that take a phone per side, and the easy one-motion strap the whole line shares. It is a bag that reads as expensive to people who know and as simply nice to people who do not.

Honest trade-off: Etoupe at this size is not a statement bag; in a crowd it disappears. And the pale-mid leather will show a faint darkening where the strap meets the shoulder after a sweaty summer. Mine has it; only I can find it.

For a first Lindy, or a fifth, this is the colour I would nominate without hesitation. Friends borrow it for interviews and weddings, and it has never once looked out of place in the photographs afterwards, which is a strange thing to be able to say about a taupe bag.