A Few Notes on Jake Paul's Wedding Saddle Bag

On Sunday, small-town boy Jake Paul married fellow YouTuber Tana Mongeau after their whirlwind two-month courtship. (Or “married”—on Monday, Buzzfeed reported that there was no trace of the marriage in Clark County records, and In Touch claims that the couple did not obtain a marriage license.)

There is plenty to write about the wedding: that it was held at the Graffiti Mansion, a Las Vegas villa previously emblazoned with the Supreme x Louis Vuitton monogram print; that an altarside brawl that interrupted the pair’s first kiss as a married couple seemed staged; that some 66,000 people paid $50 to watch a glitchy livestream of the ceremony; that, after injecting hours of Paul-Mongeau wedding content into my brain, that selfsame organ has begun leaking out of my ear. This article is not about any of these things. This article is about the fact that Jake Paul wore a Dior saddle bag for the entirety of his wedding and reception, apparently without knowing what it is called.

First, some facts. On July 26, Paul and Mongeau travelled to the bride’s hometown of Las Vegas, where Paul visited the menswear boutique Stitched. He tried on a white dinner jacket with black trim, a wide-brimmed panama hat, and swung around a Pasotti umbrella with a horse head handle like a baseball bat while misquoting Casino, a level of clownery that would get him ejected from the average suburban mall. Paul buys at least the hat and the umbrella. Stitched does not stock the Dior saddle bag, so Paul acquired it somewhere else.

Then, on July 28, Paul debuted his wedding look: a white Dior suit with a black shirt and tie, the panama hat, ice blue Dior aviators, and, slung across his chest, a black calfskin Dior saddle bag with broad nylon straps—a current-season piece part of the brand’s reboot of the bag, which was created by John Galliano in 1999. Dior’s decision to relaunch the bag followed the Beanie Baby-esque popularity of the bag’s limited-edition versions in the vintage market, a trend that started around 2016. The bag is zeitgeisty in part because it symbolizes of the convoluted relationship between fashion memes and consumerism. The mid-aughts editions with the silliest concepts (for example, John Galliano’s favorite vacation stops) tend to be the rarest—and thus worth the most—today.

You have to be a bit of a design wonk to know the whole saddle bag backstory, but most people interested in fashion know what it is, except for Jake Paul, who referred to the bag as a “satchel” in a live taping of his brother Logan Paul’s podcast and joked that he was storing a 9 millimeter pistol inside in response to a comment about the mobster energy of his outfit, which did look like Godfather cosplay executed by someone from Cleveland. Someone off-camera called it a “Christian Dior sling,” which, I guess. Paul mentioned that the entire suit was Dior and that it “cost a bag.” He also said the wedding cost “north of $750,000,” a sum he could have used to “buy four Lambos.”

The sweet thing about it, though, is that Jake Paul seems to love his saddle bag. He toted it around like a new backpack. He posed with it on the red carpet and incorporated it into his mobster bit and wore it during his vows and was still wearing it when he left the reception around midnight, separately from Mongeau, who went in a different direction with a different group of people a few minutes later. That is none of my business; I am simply happy that Tana, Jake, and the Dior saddle bag found each other.