Vivy Yusof is living up to her self-declaration as a serial entrepreneur. After launching a health supplement, she is back with a new, unmistakable public brand for bags

Vivy Yusof’s new bag line Private Era

Back in 2024, Vivy Yusof decided on Instagram Stories that she was going to be “un-influencing”. In a separate post on her grid, she shared that she was entering her “next era” and announced: “I made my account private”. That privacy proved to be elusive, and the era is less of a locked door and more of a beaded curtain. Two hours ago, Vivy Yusof shared on Instagram the impending launch of a bag brand born of her specific aesthetic touch. This was, in fact, teased on IG two weeks ago, with an accompanying blurb for her subscription-only blog: “Evolving in my private era.” As it turned out, Private Era is the name of her new venture, which seems to circle back and confirm: yes, she is still her own favorite founder and createur. Could ‘Era’ be an echo of pop culture tropes, particularly Taylor Swift’s ‘Eras’ branding? Private Era suggests retreat, introspection, even staying away from whatever needed to be avoided, yet she’s announcing it publicly on IG and her blog to promote a new accessory line. That contradiction is reminiscent of that very public announcement back in 2024. Hitherto, she remains visible, voluble, and vaunting, and apparently still influencing.

“Evolving in my Private Era” also plays awkwardly against her history. It was her own luxury bags stashed into shelving units in her home that were once symbols of excess. She attempted to sell some of those bags—by then “pre-loved”—on social media amid intense public scrutiny over massive losses at her first-born company, FashionValet. “Evolving in” also caused us to furrow our brows because of how the preposition “in” interacts with “evolving”. The phrase suggests a process happening inside a defined space or period. But “era” already implies a span of time, so the construction feels redundant. To evolve “in” suggests a static trap rather than a progression. It reads like a mistranslation of influencer speak, but more importantly, it’s rhetorically clumsy. It tries to seem profound yet ends up sounding like a slogan that hasn’t been proofed. It is unfortunate that an old hat has expressed a sentiment that is grammatically inept, rhetorically contradictory, and conceptually self-undermining. A classic influencer move it is: take a word that signals withdrawal or introspection, then broadcast it as an open lifestyle and brand.

It reads like a mistranslation of influencer speak but more importantly, it’s rhetorically clumsy

Prepositional phrasing aside, there is also the logo of Private Era. Ms Yusof has opted for the quadruple monogram by placing the initials of the brand as a deliberate intersection so that the two letters are mirror images of the other pair, side to side and top to bottom, forming a square. We are familiar with the graphic arrangement in the Loewe logo, as well as Givenchy’s blockish four Gs. The Private Era cursive monogram recall compatriot Fiziwoo’s, which itself is evocative of Loewe’s. What makes it striking is that each logo is layered with echoes of another, so Private Era doesn’t stand alone but sits in a genealogy of fashion monograms. Instead of originality, it trades in recognition—a calculated familiarity that signals luxury even before the product speaks. It looks to us that Private Era is built on the ruins of an aspiration. Looking back, we remember Duck’s signature purple box, which itself was a direct homage to the Hermès orange box. She didn’t just want to sell scarves. It was an attempt to replicate the ritual of luxury: the “unboxing” dopamine hit of a heritage house. But can you shortcut your way to the luxury tier with boxes, logos, or slogans?

Ms Yusof revealed only one Private Era bag on her socials. It is a brown tote in east-west orientation, with slim handles, and a slender sangle (belt) that wraps the top edge of the bag and the pushed-out gussets, allowing the volume to be tempered or expanded, or the opening to be gaping or closed. The belted bag is also not new. We’ve seen in Hermès’s Birkin and Kelly to Prada’s ‘Buckle’ bag. It is hard to determine with certainty the quality of the bag since Ms Yusof has not yet describe them. In her communications so far, the sangle’s utility went unmentioned; her interest lay strictly in the padlock securing the buckle. She wrote in one post, a four-line verse no less: “A lock to keep what’s your alone/To guard the things you’ve quietly grown/Within it lies a world not meant for show/A deeper beauty only you will know. We would’t have guessed that she is a poet too. There must be something to be said about going from passable slogans to nursery rhyme.

The logo of Private Era

The verse, as we see it, is intentionally simple—AABB rhyme scheme, classic sentimentalism—but its purpose is structural. It serves to romanticise her current predicament, and if the vocabulary is evocative of what’s taught in primary school, it’s only because she’s speaking the native tongue of her worshipful masses, the loyal followers who will buy into whatever narrative she stages. In fact, the launch didn’t find a market, yet. It simply harvested one from her existing readership. The decision to send invitations specifically to blog subscribers is a clever for its retention branding. She told her followers: “Invitations to your private access are emailed in batches and each comes with a time frame. Private Era naturally requires “private access” just as a cat requires a closed door to decide it actually wants to be on the other side. Clearly, a blog allows for long-form control over the narrative that a 15-second Instagram reel doesn’t. It frames this brand as an intimate secret between her and her followers—distancing it from the public money scandal. This allows her to cultivate a narrative of “resilience” among the faithful, far away from the “sartorial autopsy” the rest of the country is performing on her legal charges. How the curated silence of this Private Era will hold when the gavel falls this July (the case has been postponed religious reasons) remains the ultimate question.

The announcement of her bag label came just months after she launched her supplements brand, Just Gimme. According to Ms Yusof, the one single product is already into its third restock in less than half a year. Swinging from health supplements to handbags is a lot less a pivot than a pattern. For most influencers, categories are interchangeable. Scarves, vitamins, bags—the product is secondary. What matters is the ability to narrate each as part of a lifestyle arc. So the swing isn’t irrational in influencer terms. It’s the logic of personality‑driven commerce. The inventory is just a souvenir from the cult of her personality. In such an economy, the actual utility of the object is an afterthought. To be sure, you can hold your belongings in a Private Era bag, especially the seemingly capacious piece she has shown that can be ‘locked’. That much it can do. But it is not about buying and carrying that bag. It’s about owning a piece of Vivy Yusof’s “Private Era”. Participating in her narrative is more crucial. Because, as she declared with palpable satisfaction in her debut book, The First Decade, “Always a work in progress, my story is unfinished.”