A tote bag has always been a paradox in fashion. Simple yet functional, democratic yet endlessly adaptable, it exists at the intersection of utility and self-expression. For Spring/Summer 2025, Jakarta-based DEVA STATES — known for its bricolage of street culture, political critique, and countercultural motifs — takes this paradox and turns it into a manifesto with the SS25 Tote Bag ‘Canvas’.

The piece doesn’t merely carry your belongings. It carries a worldview — stitched in heavy-duty fabric, stamped with distressed graphics, and underlined by the tactile clash of suede and canvas. This tote is not another ephemeral accessory; it is a field note of rebellion, a portable archive of resistance, and perhaps the accessory that best encapsulates DEVA STATES’ ethos for the season.

The Design Language: Raw, Graphic, Defiantly Unpolished

The SS25 Tote Bag ‘Canvas’ arrives as a collision of materials, prints, and textures. The khaki-toned canvas serves as its base — a nod to utilitarian workwear and military surplus gear — while a suede base panel grounds it with rugged durability. Leather handles, stitched and riveted, bring tactile luxury into the mix without losing the bag’s underground sensibility.

But it is the graphics that demand attention. Scattered across the surface, screen-printed silhouettes, stamped words, and distressed typographic blocks conjure the visual language of wartime propaganda and underground zines. Phrases like “Delta Echo Victor” and “DEVA STATES” appear less as branding and more like coded messages, whispered between those who understand.

This collage-like design is quintessential DEVA STATES: cryptic, referential, and dripping with irony. The tote’s appearance suggests that it has lived another life before entering your hands — as though salvaged from history, then reimagined for today’s cultural climate.

A Deeper Reading: Politics on Fabric

DEVA STATES’ design philosophy often mines the fraught intersections of politics, media, and style. The SS25 Tote Bag ‘Canvas’ continues this trajectory, blurring the line between fashion item and social commentary.

The use of distressed imagery — black-and-white figures in trench coats, archival-style fonts, and phrases evoking military codes — situates the tote within a visual discourse on authority, rebellion, and control. At first glance, it is aesthetic. At second glance, it feels like critique.

In the age of AI-generated visuals and sanitized fast fashion, DEVA STATES insists on messiness. The graphics are not perfect; they are jagged, uneven, almost violently imposed. This imperfection, far from accidental, underscores the anti-polished, anti-commercial attitude that defines the brand’s DNA. Wearing this tote is less about carrying belongings and more about carrying a stance — an antagonism toward conformity.

Function Meets Subversion

While conceptually charged, the tote remains fundamentally practical. Its dimensions are generous enough for daily life: laptops, sketchbooks, groceries, or gym gear. The suede base adds reinforcement, preventing sagging under weight. The leather handles — sturdy yet supple — are built for repeated use.

This practicality is crucial. DEVA STATES understands that the tote bag is the modern uniform: equally at home in co-working spaces, galleries, or late-night gigs. What distinguishes this tote is its ability to function while simultaneously subverting.

To carry this bag is to broadcast more than an identity; it is to take part in an ongoing dialogue. Much like Vivienne Westwood once did with T-shirts or Comme des Garçons with deconstruction, DEVA STATES turns a basic utility object into a cultural artifact.

The SS25 Context: Fashion in a Time of Contradiction

The Spring/Summer 2025 collections have collectively embraced tension: between minimalism and maximalism, nostalgia and futurism, sustainability and excess. DEVA STATES’ tote exists comfortably within these contradictions.

• Materiality: The bag’s canvas and suede reflect sustainability by leaning into durability and reusability, while simultaneously invoking a sense of scarcity — each tote feels singular due to its uneven graphics.

• Aesthetic: Its rawness is a rejection of the polished, futuristic sheen dominating luxury houses this season. Instead, it aligns with a broader counter-trend: a return to imperfection, craft, and anti-luxury irony.

• Cultural Resonance: Where other brands package rebellion as aesthetic, DEVA STATES presents rebellion as methodology. The tote is not designed to fit in; it is designed to disrupt.

In this sense, the tote mirrors the zeitgeist of 2025: a year where fashion is both hyper-commercialized and desperately seeking authenticity.

Comparative Analysis: Tote Bags in Streetwear and Haute

The tote bag is everywhere, from Dior’s Book Tote to Stüssy’s mesh carryalls. Yet, DEVA STATES’ SS25 version sits in a different category altogether.

• Versus Luxury Totes: Where Dior or Loewe invest in monogramming and material opulence, DEVA STATES invests in conceptual grit. The SS25 tote is not about prestige; it is about perspective.

• Versus Streetwear Totes: Brands like Supreme or Palace have long turned totes into collectible merchandise. DEVA STATES, by contrast, treats the tote as canvas for discourse, not just branding real estate.

• Versus Sustainable Brands: While eco-conscious labels foreground material sourcing and recyclability, DEVA STATES foregrounds durability through rebellion — its tote does not scream “sustainable” but is built to last, resisting disposability through sturdiness and timeless edge.

This comparative lens highlights the tote as a category in flux, where meaning is as important as function. DEVA STATES pushes the tote from mere accessory into artifact.

Carried Like Protest Signs

Throughout history, the tote bag has functioned as a democratic medium for ideas. From Greenpeace slogans to feminist bookshop carriers, totes have carried more than objects — they have carried ideologies.

The SS25 Tote Bag ‘Canvas’ taps into this lineage. Its rough graphics echo DIY screen-printing traditions of punk scenes. Its distressed feel recalls zines and protest posters. In carrying it, the wearer does not merely accessorize; they participate in a lineage of cultural dissent.

In this sense, the tote is both personal and collective. On one hand, it serves as an everyday bag for urban living. On the other, it is a portable billboard, broadcasting dissent, ambiguity, and resistance.

From Studios to Streets

The tote’s versatility ensures it adapts across style subcultures:

Streetwear Enthusiasts: Paired with wide-leg cargo pants, distressed sneakers, and oversized hoodies, the tote slots seamlessly into the urban uniform.

Creative Professionals: Carried alongside tailored workwear, the tote subverts office culture — injecting rebellion into otherwise muted aesthetics.

Subcultural Aesthetes: For those invested in punk, goth, or post-industrial styles, the tote acts as a bridge between fashion and ideology, amplifying an already subversive look.

Minimalists: Even pared-down dressers can use the tote as their singular statement piece, letting its graphics speak in otherwise quiet wardrobes.

Its adaptability lies not in neutrality but in its ability to amplify — it heightens the wearer’s narrative rather than blending into it.

The Collector’s Angle

DEVA STATES operates within the logics of scarcity and community. The SS25 tote is not mass-produced in the same way as luxury or high-street counterparts. Its limitedness, coupled with its conceptual density, ensures it will become a collector’s item among those who follow the brand’s output.

Fashion collectors will note its position as both accessory and art object. Much like archival Raf Simons or vintage Undercover, DEVA STATES’ pieces accrue value not solely from their materiality but from their cultural charge. The tote is destined to occupy the same territory: an item whose relevance deepens with time.

More Than a Tote

The DEVA STATES SS25 Tote Bag ‘Canvas’ stands as one of the most striking accessories of the Spring/Summer 2025 season. At once ruggedly practical and defiantly conceptual, it transforms a simple silhouette into a carrier of meaning.

Where other brands dress up totes in patterns or monograms, DEVA STATES strips it bare — only to re-layer it with politics, rebellion, and subculture. It is not designed to blend in. It is designed to confront, to question, to disrupt.

In a world oversaturated with polished luxury and algorithmically optimized aesthetics, the SS25 Tote Bag ‘Canvas’ feels like a reminder: fashion, at its best, is not about assimilation but about interruption. And sometimes, the most radical way to interrupt is simply to carry a bag.

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