‘HANDBAGS DON’T CARE WHAT SIZE YOU ARE OR WHERE YOU’RE FROM’
None of us are emerging from lockdown looking our best selves. But when the jeans are too tight, the dress doesn’t fasten and the T-shirt appears to have ‘shrunk’, there will still be one item in our wardrobe on which we can rely. Our handbag may have been languishing at the back for the past few months but it doesn’t care if we’ve gained a few pounds. It loves us anyway.
And we love it. Or rather: them, since the average woman owns 14 handbags and spends €6.801 on them over a lifetime.
Whether we favour capacious practicality or expensive status symbol, we have always been a nation of bag lovers. It’s in our DNA.
Our love for our favourite brands runs deep. We will yearn for them, save for them, queue for them, cherish them and pass them down to our children – if they are lucky (if my 14-year-old daughter’s proclivity for losing AirPods is anything to go by, she will be waiting a long time for my Chanel ones). Victoria Beckham’s personal bag collection is rumoured to be valued at €1.7 million.
Handbag lovers of all ages will be delighted by a comprehensive new exhibition,
Bags: Inside Out, which will open at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum in November. As the keeper of more than 2,000 bags dating from 1558 to the present, it’s surprising that this will be the V&A’s first handbag display, not least when you consider the roaring success of previous fashion offerings such as 2015’s Alexander McQueen retrospective
Savage Beauty and last year’s exhibition on Christian Dior Designer of Dreams, which had a record-breaking attendance.
Bags: Inside Out spans 500 years and comprises more than 250 examples, from a delicately beaded and handpainted 1950s Waldybag by H Wald & Co, to an iconic Chanel milk carton-shaped Lait de Coco evening bag from the autumn/winter 2014 collection.
‘It’s not a history or chronology of bags, it is more about trying to understand the importance of bags, in our economy and in our everyday lives,’ says the exhibition’s curator Lucia Savi. ‘Handbags are egalitarian. It doesn’t matter what size you are or what culture you’re from. The most iconic ones have
SHE HOLDS IT WELL: GRACE KELLY WITH THE HERMES BAG THAT WAS NAMED AFTER HER, 1956
VICTORIA BECKHAM OUT AND ABOUT WITH HER HERMES BIRKIN: HER PERSONAL BAG COLLECTION IS SAID TO BE WORTH €1.7 MILLION
that instant recognition factor, thanks to their hardware or their shape. They’re a status symbol and that’s why they’re so powerful.’
I can measure out my life by my bags. A latecomer to the game, my teenage and student years were spent toting a black
Eastpak rucksack, a scruffy canvas affair that gave no hint of the handbag obsessive I would become.
Only after securing my first ‘proper job’ on a style magazine did the spark ignite, its flames fanned by helping out on fashion shoots where, for the first time, I saw designer clothes and bags up close.
After months of saving, when the time finally came to buy my first ‘grown-up’ handbag, I didn’t mess about: it was straight to Chanel to purchase a white patent-leather 2.55.
It wasn’t practical, it cost me more than a month’s wages (if memory serves, I earned €13,000 a year). But, oh, it was worth it for the joy it brought and the thrill of independence that was implicit in its purchase.
No matter that I’d have to live off baked beans – my Chanel bag was a symbol of my burgeoning financial autonomy. For many, the idea of expending such a sizeable chunk of income on a handbag would seem nuts. Yet a designer purchase can prove a very canny