Arm yourself with a chic granny bag this spring

WHEN it comes to handbags, I really think that I must be the only contrarian fashion editor.

The ever flowing glut of bags that floods the market leaves me feeling somewhere between indifferent and harrumphingly irritated.

Cursed or blessed — whichever it is — with an inherited sense of practicality, I can’t bring myself to recommend every latest useless novelty, especially those adorned with silly jingle-jangle dangly bits.

Probably it’s a throwback to the days when our mothers and grandmothers carried their doughty ‘good’ handbags for years on end, untroubled by fickle trends.

In fact, this was the normal state of affairs from the Sixties to the Eighties, if there’s anyone other than me who can remember that far back.

Perhaps that’s why the appearance of what I’ll call the reactionary handbag has breached my defences.

It happened at the spring Celine show. There, among the arty collection designed by Phoebe Philo, were a number of top-handle leather bags dangling discreetly from the wrists of models.

I craned forward in my seat for a good look.

Yes, indeed: with their neat gold metal snap fastenings, they bore an undeniable resemblance to nothing so much as the handbags carried since time immemorial by Britain’s reigning monarch.

PHOEBE Philo is one of the leading influencers of fashion in the world. How funny to see her arriving at a point where the most avant-garde statement bag she can think of is a reference to something deeply traditional.

This anti-It-bag has, ironically, become the trophy item of the moment.

Style-wise, it’s a concept that is filtering through to more accessibly priced ranges.

Have a look at the leather flap tote at Marks & Spencer, €110

(marksandspencer.ie) or its faux leather top-handle tote (€55).

Reversion to the compact silhouette of the top-handle handbag raises a lot of questions about what we all lug around with us these days.

Somewhere in it is a nostalgia for times when it didn’t take an arsenal of equipment for a woman to go about her life.

Less fuss, more discipline. I well remember the contents of my mother’s bag when I was growing up: purse, lipstick, powder compact, diary, shopping list, pen, comb, handkerchief.

New technology ought to allow us to cut out a swathe of unnecessaries. I don’t know if the Queen carries a smart phone everywhere, but the rest of us do. And what else, really, do you need?

The top-handle bag works best with everyday wear rather than formal clothes.

That’s how Celine snuck it into the show, worn with hip-length peacoats and cropped flares. That dispenses with the fear of looking like a granny while carrying a ‘granny’ bag. It’s the context that updates it.

While I’m not suggesting you blow €3,000 on a Celine top-handle model, perhaps the considered ‘investment’ purchase is another tip we should be re-learning from our mothers and grannies.

Our wardrobes may be light years away from what they wore in the Fifties and Sixties, but when women of all classes and incomes bought their handbags then, they were the best quality they could afford, chosen with the intention of lasting for years.

Grown up as we are, I think we can still take a lesson from that.