Matthew Olivolo April 5th, 2010

By Jod Kaftan, Senior Editor, LA Times Magazine

Yesterday’s nerd was a social pariah. He wore tucked-in terrycloth shirts and spent his Friday nights taking apart a radio and putting it back together. Now that same nerd has stock options, a girlfriend and a Tesla.
He’s still trying to figure out how to triangulate style, and one obvious way to accelerate his evolution is to get him a sick messenger bag for his second brain, the notebook computer.

If he’s carrying around one of those cheap leather Office Depot numbers, he’s still reminding everyone about his real DNA—dorksville. The messenger bag made its mark with a kind of tribal group of bike messengers from New York City who famously swore at pedestrians as they nearly broke bones with their tread. That’s a pedigree that will help any nerd project the darker, more mysterious energy most men need so they don’t get mugged. I’m not saying a cool messenger bag will turn Bill Gates into Randy Couture, but it’s a start.

Here are a few of my favorites:
• For the taciturn geek who hasn’t showed a flicker of emotion since Stephen Hawking’s last movie, a colorful unisex bag might serve as a kind of Patch Adams to make him leave his shell. The Sumo Messenger Bag takes some bold steps with Asian-style textiles and color but never allows form to upstage function. There’s a pronounced lack of Velcro under the flap, so when our nerd opens his bag he doesn’t sound like he just opened his wallet from 1979. Getting rid of the wallet will be for another post.

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