On my first day as an editor in the London office of the FT after 15 years in New York, I arrived in what had been my standard Manhattan workday uniform: dark suit, no tie, rucksack hanging off one shoulder. As I found my desk and sat down, a new colleague spun around in his swivel chair, pointed at my bag (now dumped on the floor) and said, “Does that thing have Disney characters on the inside?”

He was – mostly – kidding but the subtext was clear: that rucksacks are for schoolchildren, not grown men in suits. He may have been on to something. But I just could not see myself as a briefcase man.

It turns out I am not the only one. Indeed, an entire market has grown up to cater to those adults among us who like to carry their work on their back, leaving the hands free to hold, say, a broadsheet newspaper, not to mention preserving their musculature by not being weighed down on one side.