fashion math

How Many Tiny Bags Can You Fit in This Giant Bag?

Photo: Andrew Morales/WWD/Shutterstock/Courtesy of the vendor

In fashion right now, bags are either very small — like the infamous Jacquemus bag, which is the size of an orange — or very big. So it wasn’t surprising when designer Jeremy Scott of Moschino showed a massive backpack at his runway show on Monday. But it did get us thinking: How many tiny Jacquemus bags could you fit into one really giant Moschino bag?

Sharpen your No. 2 pencils, because we have a very special SAT question for you:

Jeremy Scott is a fashion designer for Moschino who showed a giant backpack in his most recent runway show. The main compartment of the bag measures 1.67 feet by 4 feet by 5 feet (according to his PR team.) Simon Porte Jacquemus is a fashion designer known for his itty-bitty bags. His Chiquiti measures 8.5 cm by 5 cm by 2 cm (according to our best estimate). If Jacquemus and Scott collaborated on some Basel-worthy fashion trolling, how many Chiquiti bags would fit in one giant Moschino backpack? And — extra credit — how much would that cost?

Pencils down, students. Let’s discuss the answer. It’s a pretty simple equation. First find the volume of each bag, and then divide the backpack’s volume by the Chiquiti’s volume. 1.67 feet by 4 feet by 5 feet means the volume of the backpack is 33.4 cubic feet; while 8.5 centimeters by 5 centimeters by 2 centimeters means the volume of the Chiquiti is 85 cubic centimeters. Convert cubic centimeters to cubic feet (you can use Google), and the Chiquiti’s volume is .003 cubic feet. Divide 33.4 by .003, and you get 11,133. Eleven thousand–one hundred–and thirty three Chiquitis could fit in a Moschino bag.

One Chiquiti bag costs $258 on the Jacquemus website. So to fill the backpack with Chiquitis, it would cost $2,872,314.

But! We don’t know how much the backpack costs, since it’s not for sale. So we’ll have to do some more math. A normal-sized backpack on the Moschino site is 6.3 inches by 9.4 inches by 12.2 inches and costs $950, full price. That backpack has a volume of .418 cubic feet. So if Jeremy Scott priced his backpacks purely by volume — which he probably doesn’t — how much would the giant bag cost? 33.4 cubic feet over .418 cubic feet equals $x over $950. And 33.4 multiplied by 950 and divided by .418 equals $75,909. That leads us to a possibly totally fictional cost of $75,909.

And $2,872,314 + $75,909 is of, course, $2,948,223. So that might be how much it costs to buy a Moschino mega-backpack and fill it with tiny bags.

But, wait — a wrinkle! The Chiquitis are not perfect rectangular prisms, because the handle is taller than the bag but not as deep. For help with this dilemma, I called my brother, an engineer. Should we be thinking of the bags as pyramids rather than prisms? He said it probably wouldn’t make that big of a difference, and that it’s not realistic to assume there would be zero space in between the bags in the backpack, which the 11,133 figure assumes. If you really were doing this, you could probably fit about 11,000 bags in there, give or take a few dozen.

Which means we have to dial back our bulk cost figure, too, but not by much. It would cost about $2.913 million to fill this giant bag (assuming it’s priced for volume, which again, it probably isn’t) with tiny bags. If you have a spare $2.913 million and would like to participate in a geometry experiment in the name of fashion, please call us.

How Many Tiny Bags Can You Fit in This Giant Bag?