What Is a Parent Bag? Why the Category Is Finally Being Renamed
This essay is part of our Best Diaper Bags series, where we cover what actually matters for design-conscious parents.
Lululemon doesn't sell diaper bags. It sells a New Parent Backpack. Tom Bihn doesn't sell a diaper bag either — it sells something called the Parental Unit. agnès b., the French fashion house, has a product in its current collection literally called the Parents Bag. Colugo's flagship for new parents is named The Parent Backpack. None of these brands are baby brands. And that, more than anything, is the point.
The category known in the US as the diaper bag, in the UK as the changing bag, and in Australia as the nappy bag, is in the middle of a quiet rename. It's happening in product naming, in retailer taxonomy, in editorial copy, and in how parents describe their own bags on forums. What it hasn't yet had is a name of its own. The bags the market is moving toward are increasingly being called parent bags — a term still too new to surface on Google Trends, already established enough that brands outside the baby industry use it as standard. This is a piece about what that shift is, why it's happening, and what it means for anyone still shopping in a category that's outgrown its own label.
The diaper bag describes about a third of its own lifespan
The first reason the name is wrong is arithmetic. Heavy diaper use lasts roughly three years — birth through potty training, which most children complete somewhere between two and three. After that, nappies disappear from the packing list almost overnight. What remains is a bag that still has to hold snacks, spare clothes, wipes, a water bottle, maybe a tablet, and increasingly the parent's own things. The diaper stopped being the reason to carry it somewhere around the second birthday.
The bag itself, meanwhile, doesn't retire. Go on any parenting forum and the same pattern appears: the bag outlasts the baby by a decade. Parents describe using the same diaper bag as a travel bag when their child is seven, as a school-trip bag when their child is eleven, as a work tote when the kids are teenagers. One Lands' End bag, bought for a newborn, was still in service sixteen years later, repurposed as a cabin bag. The object has a 10 to 15-year service life. The "diaper" part describes the first quarter of it. We don't name cars after their first owner. The naming convention of this category is uniquely backwards.
The contents are parental, not pediatric
Look at what parents actually carry in these bags. On Mumsnet, The Bump, PurseForum, and dozens of parenting blogs, the pattern is consistent. Parents describe transferring their phone, wallet, keys, and sunglasses into the diaper bag as soon as they have a baby — and never carrying a separate purse again. The "replaced my purse" phenomenon appears so often in parent writing it has the feel of a universal rite. One Berkeley Parents Network post from 2010: a desire to have the diaper bag double as a purse, to stop carrying two bags. A Rockin' Mama blog from the same era: her cute black purse is actually a diaper bag. A Mumsnet thread from 2009: her change bag has a zip compartment where her purse, keys, and phone live.
Beyond the basics, the real list is where the argument becomes unarguable. Parents describe carrying laptops (often up to 15 inches), passports, Kindles, makeup, menstrual supplies, medication, spare tops for themselves, granola bars, water bottles, work documents. A former nursing mother described her diaper bag as a "diaper-laptop-carry-everything-but-the-kitchen-sink bag." Another described using it as the one bag she needed for the gym, for work, and for the baby. A parent on Amazon reviewing a diaper backpack wrote that it fit her laptop, iPad Pro, chargers, two books, her water bottle, her own snacks, and all the baby supplies.
This is not a diaper bag. This is an adult's bag with a baby compartment in it. The name is lagging behind the use.
The product specs already gave the answer
If you want proof that the category has quietly repositioned itself around adults, look at the spec sheets. The current generation of premium bags in this space read like work or travel backpacks. Dagne Dover's Indi backpack has a luggage sleeve for carry-on travel and a laptop carrier up to 16 inches. Béis's Ultimate Diaper Backpack has a padded 13" or 15" laptop pocket, a trolley pass-through, and a removable crossbody fanny pack. Paperclip's Willow has a padded laptop sleeve and luggage pass-through. Petunia Pickle Bottom makes a bag with a tech sleeve for laptops up to 17 inches.
These features — padded laptop compartments, luggage pass-throughs, trolley sleeves, clamshell openings, separate work pockets — didn't originate in the diaper-bag category. They migrated in, wholesale, from work backpacks, travel bags, and everyday-carry gear. The baby industry didn't invent these features. It imported them because the actual buyer needed them.
The format shift tells the same story. According to Grand View Research, the backpack format held 37.3% of the diaper-bag market in 2018. By 2024, it had risen to roughly 39%, driven explicitly by the need for a hands-free design that doesn't read as feminine. Tote formats, which dominated the category when it was coded as a mother's accessory, lost ground. The bag became a backpack because both parents needed to carry it, often at the same time.
Both parents now carry it — and Italy is the sharpest version of that curve
Italy used to be the cautionary tale. A country where fathers stayed out of early childcare, where mothers carried the bag because the bag was built for mothers, where the baby industry designed for an audience of one. In 2013, only 19.2% of eligible Italian fathers took compulsory paternity leave when their child was born. A decade later, according to INPS, that figure had risen to 64.5%. The shift in who is physically present during the early caregiving years — and therefore who is carrying the bag — has been more dramatic in Italy than in almost any comparable European country.
The broader data points in the same direction. In the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 67% of married-couple families with children had both parents employed in 2024. Pew Research reports that fathers now represent 18% of all US stay-at-home parents, up from 11% in 1989. The Centers for Disease Control's National Survey of Family Growth found that 90% of resident fathers of children under five bathe, diaper, or dress their children every day or several times a week. In peer-reviewed analysis of American Time Use Survey data, married fathers' childcare time rose from 6.9 hours a week in 2003 to 8.3 hours in 2023 — a 20% increase in two decades.
Italy sits at the front of that trend rather than behind it. Italian first-time mothers are, on average, 31.9 years old — the oldest in the European Union. The cohort having children in Italy today is overwhelmingly dual-income, older, and more likely to share early caregiving than the cohort of thirty years ago. A product category built around the assumption that one parent — specifically the mother — does all the carrying is a product category built for a household model that is quietly disappearing.
None of this is a moral argument. It's a design one. A bag that gets carried by two different adults at different times, over a decade of use, can't credibly be named after its narrowest function. The "diaper bag" assumes a single user and a single life stage. Neither assumption is still true.
The brands closest to the product have already renamed it
The clearest evidence that the rename is already underway isn't editorial — it's commercial. Brands that actually make and sell these bags have, one by one, abandoned "diaper bag" in their product naming.
Lululemon, entering the category in 2023, called its product the New Parent Backpack and filed it under Men's Bags on its own site. Tom Bihn, a premium USA-made bag company, sells a bag called the Parental Unit with product copy that reads, "If you want a bag that screams 'I'm a parent!', you'll have to look elsewhere." Colugo, a design-led baby brand, named its flagship The Parent Backpack and describes it as a bag that "looks like a normal backpack and acts like your go-to diaper bag." The French fashion house agnès b. sells a product literally titled the Parents Bag.
The language shift extends beyond product names. Itzy Ritzy updated the copy on its newer bags to rename its signature front compartment from a "mom pocket" to a "parent pocket." Dagne Dover's entire baby bag navigation category is now labelled Parenting, with the collection tagline "Baby bags built for parents, loved by all." Béis, which still calls its product the Diaper Bag for SEO reasons, describes it in its own copy as "an everyday backpack first and a parent bag second" — the one "both partners actually want to carry." In 2023, InsideHook reviewed the Lululemon release under the headline "The Diaper Bag, Rebranded." No one — not the magazine, not the brand — used the word diaper in the product name.
What's notable is that the brands most active in this rename are the ones operating outside the traditional baby-gear category. Lululemon is an athleisure brand. agnès b. is a fashion house. Tom Bihn is a technical everyday-carry brand. Peak Design, which is used by many parents as a diaper bag, is a camera-gear company. The baby industry is the last part of the market to catch up to a shift its own customers are driving.
A parent bag is a lifecycle use-case, not a feature set
The most precise way to describe the shift is this: a diaper bag is defined by a function, and that function has a shelf life of about three years. A parent bag is defined by a user — the adult carrying it — and lasts as long as that adult wants it to. The old category named the cargo. The new category names the carrier.
That reframe changes what the object is supposed to be. A bag defined by diapers is, by design, an apologetic object. It exists to do a specific, temporary, slightly unglamorous job. It's meant to look like a diaper bag because that's what it is. A bag defined by the parent is the opposite. It's meant to look like whatever the adult who carries it would have chosen to carry anyway — a travel backpack, a work tote, an everyday crossbody — with enough structure and organization to handle a child's supplies when that's part of the day. The diaper is a feature, not a category. The parent is the category.
This is the frame that brands like Colugo, Lululemon, Tom Bihn, agnès b., Dagne Dover, and Béis are, in different ways, converging on. It's also the frame we started from at Vilanera.
Where Vilanera fits
Vilanera is an Italian brand, made in Italy, built around a single premise: a parent bag that doesn't look like a baby product. Technical materials. Architectural silhouette. Gender-neutral by construction, not by compromise. A removable wet bag, an insulated pocket, a laptop sleeve, a structured base. Every functional element is there because a parent actually needs it; none of them announce themselves as baby features.
The bag we make is the bag a parent would have bought before the baby, and would still carry after. That's the thesis. The category has a new name because the product has a different job now — and it's one we've designed for from the beginning.
Want to see more of what this looks like in practice? Our guide to parent bags that don't look like baby products covers the current landscape in detail. For the broader picture across every format and price point, our full diaper bag guide covers every category from backpacks to totes to travel bags.
