Emily Cronin examines an unlikely lockdown boom

Face masks aren’t the only accessory success story of lockdown. While most of us were confined to our homes, contrary to predictions, sales of designer bags boomed. Emily Cronin finds out why

After the dried beans, the 5kg sacks of rice, the gin, the backup gin, the laptop stand, the face masks, the leggings and the fuzzy slippers, many women found space on their lockdown shopping lists for one more must-have: the nice new handbag.

A designer bag may not be the most obvious souvenir from a period when most Britons barely left their homes, but this manner of purchase found traction with countless shoppers from late March through to early summer.

‘Any item that could be considered an investment piece and where the brand has clear longevity, the customers not only continued buying, [but] we saw demand increasing,’ says Ida Petersson, buying director at brownsfashion.com. ‘We also saw brands that have had a lot of hype continue to hold their allure, despite people being unable to use them anywhere other than in their own homes to start with.’

Top-selling designs included Gucci’s vintage-style Horsebit bags (30 per cent up over June at matchesfashion.com), quilted Saint Laurent shoulder bags (up 94 per cent), Lemaire’s Croissant style and anything from Jacquemus. Enough people took an interest in Loewe’s

Instagram-famous basket bag to earn it a spot on Lyst’s rundown of the 10 most popular womenswear products of lockdown. As for the puffy quilted shoulder bags and marshmallowy leather pouches from Bottega Veneta, one drop sold out within four days of landing on brownsfashion.com. (And elsewhere. I have a friend who frantically refreshed the Matches site whenever she received an email alerting her that her wish-listed Bottega Cassette was in stock – only for it to have sold out to faster-fingered clickers. Eventually she gave up and treated herself to a Celine Trio instead.)

Then there was Chanel. Sales of its 2.55, Boy and Gabrielle styles must have been robust enough for executives to feel a price hike of up to 17 per cent wouldn’t dent demand. Elsewhere in the luxury-verse, the Hermès flagship in Guangzhou rang up $2.7 million worth of transactions on the day it reopened, according to Women’s Wear Daily – a record for daily sales in China and a sign of a luxury rebound.

The It bags of lockdown looked a lot like the It bags of pre-lockdown, which is intriguing when so many other aspects of life seem unrecognisable. That’s probably part of the appeal. For many women, purchasing a bag is a wishful act: if you buy it, maybe at some point you’ll lead a life in which you need it.

Handbags also seem a surer financial bet these days than, say, holidays. After innumerable cancelled flights, hotel bookings, birthday parties, weddings, dinners out and so on, buying a new bag can look like a justifiable (and tangible) way to spend the refunds. No wonder someone who held on to a well-paying job while watching their spending take a nosedive might feel flush enough for a consolation prize in the form of a little Gucci.

It might even be a smart hedge against market fluctuations. In the past, any talk of ‘investing’ in fashion served to justify sky-high prices. Now it’s a bona-fide strategy. At the end of July, Christie’s presented a handbags and accessories auction with sales totalling £1,871,750. The top lot was a rare Hermès matt-white Himalaya Niloticus Crocodile Birkin 30 with palladium hardware, 2016. Its pre-sale estimate was £50,000 to £70,000; its final price, £118,750.

‘I did not see any reduction in prices in this last sale,’ says Rachel Koffsky, the head of handbag sales at Christie’s. ‘The market has not suffered based on lockdown or uncertainty. In fact we’re seeing that in times of global uncertainty, collectors look to alternative investments, or to functional items that carry their value in a different way.

‘The handbag has never been more relevant, the market has never been stronger, and it’s never been more important – as a luxury object, as a collectible and as a valuable asset.’

What looks like a smart handbag investment now? Koffsky says classic styles ‘are always going to be auction favourites’. She likes Christian Dior’s Lady D and Saddle bags, Chanel front-flap models and anything from Hermès. ‘Buy what you’re drawn to and what you’re going to wear, and take good care of it.’

There are plenty of exciting options well below the Birkin price bracket too – if you can get them. American designer Telfar Clemens’s logo-embossed Shopping Bag costs around £130 and is so popular that would-be customers crashed the Telfar website trying to buy styles from the late-july delivery. ‘It is the craziest paradox: when something is so accessible that no one can get it,’ Clemens told The Cut. In response, he opened up pre-orders for one day only; the no-refund, no-exchange, no-cancellation purchases won’t arrive until January.

Natasha Fernandes Anjo, founder of Roop, saw the popularity of her tiny knotted handbags boom over lockdown. She makes them using deadstock fabric, so everything comes in limited quantities. Since mid-march, fans have snapped up the bags as fast as she can make them (she recently hired someone to increase her output). It helps that at about £65, these are relatively cheap thrills – and, unlike with clothes, no one has ever had to wonder if a handbag will fit before clicking ‘buy’.

‘A great bag is an instant way to feel better and feel like you’ve made a bit of an effort,’ she says. Plus, ‘It’s an easy photo op – you can put it with your banana bread.’

The bags we reach for after lockdown will be bags we choose less for practical reasons, more for the aesthetics or the statement they make. The work tote is dead, or at least in hibernation; Roop’s little dashing-out bags and others that look good casually placed into a video-call frame are on the rise. ‘I went to a Zoom wedding and everybody had their little clutch bags and shoes,’ Koffsky says. ‘It was so special. We felt like we were all together, even though of course we weren’t.’ Further proof that the right handbag can take you anywhere, even if you never leave the house.