The Best Sling Bag for Men Is a Smarter Way to Store Your Stuff

Scant few fellas land on the best sling bag for men by actively looking for it. Who, pray tell, doesn’t know a guy who crams all his knick-knacks, doohickeys, and thingamajigs into the overstuffed pockets of his pants, refusing, on principle, to port them around in a bag? Don’t be that guy. Instead, allow us to introduce the far more stylish way to haul your gear right now, an ergonomic alternative to the standard messenger that eschews the bulkiness of a backpack—and the flimsy-as-hell straps of a tote—in favor of sheer, unadulterated utility. We’re talking, of course, about the sling bag—and if you lend us your ear (and a spare shoulder), you will be, too.

For anyone old enough to remember the '90s (or young enough to inherit its trauma), sling bags, you might recall, were not always cool. In 2024, though, there’s a whole gamut of them to explore: designer slings, budget slings, teched-out slings, outdoorsy slings, slings so secure they could (probably, we didn’t test this) survive the Oklahoma Drill without budging an inch. So to free your pockets, we strapped in, got to trekking, and landed on the most excellent sling bag for men—plus 14 other superlative options.

The Best Sling Bags for Men, According to GQ

• The Best Sling Bag Overall: Carhartt Mono Sling Backpack, $45
• The Best Trail-Ready Sling Bag: Patagonia Atom 8L Sling Bag, $65
• The Best Commuter Sling Bag: Gramicci Cordura Sling Bag, $105
• The Best Designer Sling Bag: Loewe Puzzle Edge Small Leather Belt Bag, $1,980
• The Best Pared-Down Sling Bag: Baggu Medium Nylon Crescent Bag, $52
• The Best Heirloom-Grade Sling Bag: Kapital Heavy Canvas Transit Snufkin Bag, $457

Best Sling Bag Overall: Carhartt Mono Sling Backpack

If you’re looking for an affordable sling bag that does a bit of everything—and comes equipped with enough storage to haul bulkier personal items—Carhartt’s is nigh-impossible to beat. For starters, it boasts a padded laptop pocket, which is always a nice perk, and the main compartment is spacious enough to hold a camera, a 6-pack, or a bunch of other potentially necessary items that wouldn’t fit in a more compact counterpart. It helps, of course, that its exterior is made from the type of tough, water-repellent textile the first name in workwear is famous for, and that said exterior features multiple easy-to-reach storage pockets to keep your gear at the ready. Oh, and the padded strap has a nifty quick-release function and a lil’ pocket for anything you need direct access to. Like we said: nigh-impossible to beat.

Best Trail-Ready Sling Bag: Patagonia Atom 8L Sling Bag

When you’re on the trail, “rummaging” shouldn’t be high on your list of designated activities—you want whatever you’ve lugging in to be easily accessible, reasonably protected, and, above all else, easy to carry. Patagonia’s Atom sling checks all those boxes with aplomb. It’s made from a tough, 100% recycled polyester that’s been treated with a water-repellent finish, comes outfitted with an ergonomic strap that distributes weight across the entire torso, and boasts pockets pretty much everywhere you could imagine putting a pocket—even on the exterior of said ergonomic strap. If you’re looking for a sling bag that likes to touch grass—or, heck, limestone—as much as you do, look no further.

Best Commuter Sling Bag: Gramicci Cordura Sling Bag

One of the sling bag’s primary selling points is how secure it’ll stay when you’re on the move—with a single strap, the right version can mimic the locked-in support of a backpack with double its carrying capacity. If you’ve got places to be, that’s huge—especially if you’re trying to maintain a low-profile. Of all the sling bags with that particular benefit, Gramicci’s option was our favorite: it comes equipped with enough space to haul a laptop and the padding to protect it, but its profile is slim enough to squeeze onto a crowded train or hide under an umbrella during a surprise drizzle. The pockets are easily accessible, and when things get especially chaotic, the press-release sternum strap locks the whole shebang in for good.

Best Designer Sling Bag: Loewe Puzzle Edge Small Leather Belt Bag

Sometimes, you want your bag to be more than practical—you want it to be a flex in its own right. When that’s the case, you have two options: big logos or venerable designs, the type that don’t require a splashy luxury emblem to ID in a flash. The Loewe Puzzle Edge bag is the latter. Its distinct geometric shape is achieved using multiple monochromatic patches, providing both structure and pattern, without stealing the spotlight entirely from the rest of your outfit. (Which means you can wear it with pretty much everything, despite its eye-watering price tag.) Better yet, if you’re traveling, that unique construction is designed to collapse into itself, packing into a suitcase with plenty of room for the really important stuff: said outfits, obviously.

Best Pared-Down Sling Bag: Baggu Medium Nylon Crescent Bag

Sometimes, of course, you just need a bag that carries a bunch of stuff and looks halfway decent doing it—nothing more, nothing less. That’s where Baggu’s perfectly streamlined sling comes in. It’s crafted from a hardy recycled nylon, boasts an endlessly-useful adjustable crossbody strap, and zips all the way closed, making it a pretty unimpeachable tote alternative for lazy packers. What more, really, can you ask for?

Best Heirloom-Grade Sling Bag: Kapital Heavy Canvas Transit Snufkin Bag

If you’re wondering why you’d buy a linen sling bag, well, uh, fair enough—linen doesn’t exactly scream ‘BAG’, and your gear isn’t susceptible to heat stroke the same way your body is. Underestimate our favorite flaxy fabric at your own peril, though: you already know it’s ludicrously breezy, but it’s crazy strong and dries quickly, too. Which is why we were especially amped to see Kapital’s Snufkin bag—already an all-time riff on the silhouette—hit the shelves in a new-and-improved linen form, just in time for August. Aesthetics alone would warrant its inclusion on this list: the dye is subtly uneven, which lends it the look of a vintage grail fresh out of the box. The adjustable strap is nice, too, but the real star of the show is the massive storage capacity, which can be zipped, rolled, and/or affixed with leather straps depending on the context. Don’t let its rarified Japanese origin fool you, either: a piece like this only gets better with serious wear.

More Sling Bags We Love

Sling bags come in a whole bunch of shapes, sizes, materials, and capabilities, so we set out to find bags across that spectrum. While it makes little sense to compare a sling bag designed for the outdoors to one made from supple leather—different strokes for different folks—bags are also bags, so we wanted to ensure that transitive standards were established, focusing primarily quality of materials and construction, carrying capabilities, and how good it performs the job it was made to do. With that in mind, here are a few important things to look out for:

Intended function. What are you primarily going to be using the bag for? Materials, design features and hardware choices all dictate what the bag was made to do, aside from carry stuff, which many can do. Because bags are made to do different things, we didn’t make it about the range of function, but rather how well they do what they promise to do. In other words, we didn’t go to the crag with a fancy leather bag to test out its dexterity in the wilderness, because that’s not what a fancy leather bag is meant to do. Instead we graded it on how well it did fancy leather bag things, and the same goes for those on the other end of the spectrum—if using it on a hike or a commute and need it to be tough, a synthetic would be best suited for the task.

Size. That “L” you see stands for liters, which is the standard metric for carrying capacity. The more liters that could theoretically fit in your bag—don’t dump liquid inside, there’s no need to check math—the more you can haul. Size denotations like Small/Medium/Large will give you an idea of what the model looks like relative to other models, but it won’t give you a great understanding of how much you could actually fit in your new bag. For the sake of versatility, we leaned a bit more on those in the middle—bags need to carry stuff, as we noted earlier.

Quality of Construction/Materials. Anyone who’s had a bag of any kind break on them can attest to the special brand of betrayal you feel, a feeling that’s multiplied when it’s a bag of the non-disposable variety. In other words, bags need to hold up and the way they do is with top-tier materials and rock-solid construction. Again, the rubric isn’t going to look the same for bags across the use-case spectrum, but the standards are for every bag we reviewed. Things like taped seams, reinforced stress-points, caliber of hardware and fabric selection are all things to consider, and were during our process.

There are a few. Technically, messenger bags and sling bags are both shoulder bags, but shoulder bags aren’t necessarily either. If this is confusing, we sympathize with the sentiment, but know that the primary difference between a sling bag and a messenger bag is that the strap of a sling bag is engineered to lay diagonally across the shoulders and chest, where as a messenger bag is more of a dealer’s choice. (A shoulder bag is a larger category, and a crossbody bag is a daintier proposition, generally.)

Due to the strap position and the prevalent oblong shape, you get the weight distribution of a backpack with one less strap, which is nice, and that same design makes it easy to lock into place and also swing around when on the move. They also can be worn over a single shoulder, which offers some versatility, and because there tends to be a lot of surface area, it’s a pocket-amenable design.