Five or six years ago, New York-based designer and artist Ernest Sabine used to be that guy at the airport — the one bogged down by way more physical baggage than he actually needed to be carrying.
“I used to be a notorious over packer. You should have seen me,” he told Gear Patrol on a recent afternoon. “I literally would have two huge duffle bags, trying to think of every scenario that I could possibly be in. From [needing a] blazer to, what if we do something fancy or formal or whatever?”
He’s come a long way since then, partially out of necessity. His new role as the creative director of the Minnesota-based leather goods brand J.W. Hulme sees him spending one week out of every month in St. Paul — and he now manages to pack everything he needs for the trip into one duffle and a backpack.
“I think high level, my theory is that less is more,” he said. “Maybe I only need one pair of really nice denim that’s versatile, and one pair of shoes. I can just have a few T-shirts and get this down to one reasonable sized carry-on.”
But the things inside the carry-on and backpack he now relies on are just as streamlined as the bags themselves. Below, a look at the things that are always with Sabine on his travels.
JW Hulme Backpack, Duffle Bag and Travel Kit
“One of the first things I did when I started the position was to select a few of their core pieces to really get a feel for how the product functions, how it feels, the weight of it, the functionality of it,” Sabine said. He travels most frequently with the Continental Duffle and the Crosstown Backpack (the smaller of the two men’s backpacks J.W. Hulme offers) because they’re streamlined — and the backpack, which slides under plane seats easily, regularly gets compliments at the airport. “[When] you’re going through airport security or whatever, you don’t want to be bogged down with a million big bags,” he said.
