The Olympic Games are a consistent magnet for design criticism–professional and amateur alike–as seen most clearly in last summer’s messy reaction to the London 2012 logo. Personally, when speaking of an event as universal as the Olympics, I tend towards the “better a weird logo” camp than the “obviously designed by committee” one, so I found the harshness directed towards the London logo (it does have its defenders, too) far preferable to the usual collective shrug/ignorance meted out to high-profile logos like this.

Last year in Brussels I saw a great shirt with the Moscow 1980 logo on it, and I realized there’s a dearth of products out there that take advantage of the wonderful design history of the Olympic Games. Whether it’s the concentric lines of the Mexico 68 logo (the closest thing I own that’s similar is this killer shirt from iso50) or the beautiful simplicity of the Tokyo 64 logo, this is a heritage of design ripe for a wide-scale reintroduction–something likely blocked because, for legal reasons, any old designer can’t slap a classic Olympic logo on a t-shirt and start selling it.

Whether or not Colloco’s new PVC-leather Olympic Logo Bags are legal is beside the point–they’re fantastic. The aforementioned 64 and 68 designs are beautifully represented, and the Munich 72 games are rendered with the iconic sport-specific pictograms created by Otl Aicher specifically for those games (good thing, as those symbols are more enduring than the actual Olympic logo of that year, although it’s good too). There’s also a re-imagining of the Los Angeles 84 logo, and the great Moscow 80 one as well.

It’s an Olympic Year, which means it’s time to either protest, embrace, observe, or simply ignore the Beijing Games; I’m not sure which one I’ll choose for August (probably the complicated ignorance through vacation route), but should I decide, on a whim, to express my Olympic Spirit through a woman’s handbag, I’ll stick with the classics.