I wasted my time reading about bags this morning, because I get the Review-a-Day from Powells.com and today’s review was fashion writer Lynn Yaeger, of the Village Voice, on three different books on handbag style.
She writes:
Forty years ago — even 30 — there was no such thing as a “hot” bag. You had something square and black, or brown and squashy, that you carried in the daytime; something smaller and shinier for evening; and maybe something made of velvet or straw if you were a hippie. Now an impressively large number of women, in addition to worrying about how thin they are and whether they can walk a block in the shoes they’re wearing, also feel compelled to spend in the neighborhood of $2,000 on a purse. And it isn’t only wealthy women who are shelling out; middle-class women, working women, even schoolgirls are also deeply conscious of what they are carrying. If a serious bag once signified that you were a grown-up, now the brand name on your bag signifies what kind of grown-up you are.
The article finishes with her account of buying a replica Louis Vuitton bag when the one she had on order didn’t show up, then shoving it to the back of the closet because of her reluctance to carry a second-hand-status bag despite the number of compliments she’d gotten on it.
She’s a little wrong on her history. When I was a kid and moved down South in 1967, I arrived in a place where status was absolutely bespoken by some mahogany brown and tweed style of handbag which was all to do with its NAME which I don’t recollect but it was relatively expensive for the time–and this was in the fifth grade in public school.
I’d no clue what magic the bag conferred, but those fifth grade Southern WASP girl gangs wore Brooks Brothers button down pastel shirts under Brooks Brothers pastel cardigans with either a flippy Brooks Brothers pleated skirt or a more confining A-line, and carried the ubiquitous tweed and mahogany leather bag, and wouldn’t let you play jump rope with them though it was the school jump rope. Or at least not me. So the bag was truly magical. I (who argued that the school jump rope was a public jump rope and so we should all be able to play jump rope, which only succeeded in having me branded as a Communist by the teacher) was from the West Coast and in my neighborhood there hadn’t been much stress on clothing except for what looked sun worthy (tank tops and shorts). My dress-up attire consisted of a miniskirt that rode on the hips and was boldly printed with blue flowers, which came with its own fake wide patent leather black belt, and a pair of fishnet stockings with black patent flats and a nondescript white shirt. Yet it wasn’t just the difference in what we thought was fashionably cool that revealed the WASP girls and I not sharing much the same values. I was still looking for trees to climb and riding around on my skateboard and here were these girls wholly preoccupied with THE BAG, which was much the same as their mother’s fashionable bag.
In a town which offered nothing familiar recreation or fashion wise, my burgeoning sense of fashion, which had been wholly West Coast, collapsed, aided also by my mother who about that time went through her own fashion crisis and decided I should start dressing like my two-year-old sister, or her, she couldn’t decide which, but also by a friend who was determined I should have THE BAG (there were knock offs then, too) and because that was really about all there was on the budget tables of Augusta’s major department store, that’s another reason I ended up buying a knock-off of the bag, which I hated with every ounce of my flesh and even offended my nose because I could smell it from ten paces and hated its smell. I hated its feeble combination of cheap vinyl and cheaper leather and the obligatory pseudo designer monogram in metal. I hated its little buckles. I loathed that bag and the bags it was supposed to emulate which were slung over the arm of every Augusta woman worth a ticket to the Masters, and their daughters’ arms as well. My skateboard soon deteriorating and there being no skateboards in town and no skateboarders, no trees to climb, no desert to roam, no tumbleweed to dodge, I was left sitting on the suburban curb in a green and white checked matching shirt and short set (with ruffles) my mother had purchased for me (which I eventually intentionally strategically ripped, not on a seam, when I realized no it wouldn’t be a cardinal sin for me to do so) watching the other girls ride by on their way to riding lessons (not western saddles, no no, had to be eastern) and the boys zipping up and down the street on their bikes throwing frogs and dashing their innards out on the asphalt.
The times, they were ugly.
I was thrown for a loop from which there was no social or emotional recovery and stuck things out as best as I could until I was thirteen and pants, not jeans, were finally allowed in the schools and you could make your own bags out of macrame. Buying my own clothes with my babysitting money from the age of eleven or twelve, I dove into jeans as two pair would do you (I lavishly embroidered them) and did yes wear them to school despite the ban. One’s homeroom teacher was responsible for turning you in if you weren’t appropriately dressed. “I’m going to have to send you to the principal’s office,” my Brooks Brothers wearing homeroom teacher would sigh and said nearly daily, shaking her head. My response? “If the school wants to tell me what to wear, then the school can buy my clothes.” She never turned me in for the jeans and if you made it past your homeroom teacher for some weird reason you were home free. I think she felt for me because I very obviously had “issues”. Plus, both my home economics teacher and the vice principal had been preoccupied with getting me booted from school and I guess she figured her paperwork, added to the mounting pile condemning me for insolence, would be overkill.
The parents of the girl who’d been my other best friend owned a clothing boutique stocked with treats gathered from regular buying expeditions to New York. She and I split in Junior High over several things, one of the issues being clothing. She said that morally she could never wear jeans. She had to dress in outfits, not only because of the family store but because jeans were common. Get this. Yes, she one day sat me down for a heart-to-heart on how we must part ways on this account, because I had gone the way of jeans. Again, there were other issues (there always were) but I remember her little talk well on the moral and ethical failings of common jeans and how her world was moving in a very different direction than mine as symbolized by those jeans and how she must instead dress for success. She could wear pants, but not ever the lowly jeans.
Here I’d thought jeans were just wonderful for dressing for success because as long as you were in jeans no one could rag you for wearing the same outfit several days in a row. I’d thought this was a wonderful way of broadening the field and making us all a little more equal, which to me was successful living.
By then, the tweed and mahogany bags were falling out of fashion but it still vaguely mattered what kind of bag you carried though it didn’t need to be stamped with a name. Big velvet Mary Poppins bags were popular and leather bags painted with flowers. If you didn’t carry the velvet bag you did the macrame bag. Because the velvet bags were pricey, I made my own macrame bag. And my friend who wouldn’t wear jeans eventually bought my macrame bag off me and one of the crocheted shawls I’d made and one of the leather hats I’d made. Yes, I even made floppy leather hats. By the time she bought the bag I’d discovered the army surplus knapsack, which was what I used for carting my belongings, or an army cartridge pack, until the 1996 Olympics came to Atlanta and there was the bomb that killed one person and injured a number of others. We’re talking over two decades of army surplus knapsacks, but I got rid of mine that summer because I kept thinking guns and ammo when I looked at it, and got myself a nylon backpack from Target instead.
Nowadays I carry a leather backpack/sling that my mother gave me a couple of years ago because it turned out to be a style she couldn’t use. This isn’t an expensive leather backpack and yet, after decades of army surplus and nylon backpacks, I had to take a serious look at it before transferring my belongings to it. Did I really want to move “upscale” into this leather pack that had lots of convenient hidden zippered pockets? Yes. I really liked it and it was convenient and its size kept me from stuffing twenty pounds of books into it. The leather also stands between me and the edgy jibs and jabs of whatever is in the pack. Nice. (Only drawback is it’s a little small and nowadays I wish I’d a larger one that would accommodate my camera, but I still manage to fit it in there.)
And that is my personal history of the bag. From the macrame to the army knapsack to the nylon knapsack to the leather backpack that has no ID as to maker, just an interior label that guarantees the leather as real and from Columbia.
This morning after reading the book review on BAGS I looked up some of the bags talked about, of which I was already aware because of the computer and you’re just going to end up aware. I found a bag forum where you can not only discuss your love of your bags but where you can post photos of your collection of bags, and many bag blogs where women write in concerned that the $400 Fendi they just purchased on Ebay might be NOT REAL after all.
Duh.
How you can have the brains to make even $400 you can spend on a handbag but not have the common sense to know what you’re buying on E Bay is a knock-off, I don’t know.
Don’t call them knock-offs though. Call them replicas.
The forum devoted to REAL handbag enthusiasts is broken down by designer. The Louis Vuitton forum beats out the others with 21,586 threads and 605,372 posts (all those girls I knew back in fifth grade). Next in the running is the Hermes with 5,778 threads and 221,326 posts, then Balenciaga with 7,885 threads and 192,951 posts.
I like the post from the woman who was on the subway and saw a woman carrying a fake olive Balenciaga and wanted to leap through the glass and “tear her a new a**hole!” but didn’t say anything to her because the offending woman was with her child and protected by glass. This was followed by rants from other women yelling about people who knowingly carry fake handbags and talking about how they’ll approach people who are carrying fake bags and ask about the bags in order to make them uncomfortable.
Then there’s the post from the woman who within two months got a “vert gazon GH city” and then a Chloe and a Coach and was experiencing doubts because she had all her other bags and just didn’t know how to fit them all into her life, and yet every time she got a bag there was a new one she wanted…and she was hoping for words of wisdom from the pack on whether or not one could have too many bags.
If you don’t mind not owning then you can “borrow” a Balenciaga bag from begborroworsteal.com for $205 a month.
They post photos of themselves with their bags. They are mostly dressed in unimaginative, nondescript clothing standing in rooms that are unimaginative and nondescript. Their environments and clothing largely don’t look on the scale of supporting numerous expensive handbags, but appearances can be deceiving. Their jeans are, at least, probably expensive jeans. I’ve no idea if I know any women who carry such bags but I do know if I ever pass such on the street they probably are taking in a quick glance of the bags other women are sporting, with no conscious effort recognize mine is of no significance and pass me over, while never for a second does it even register for me if someone else is carrying a bag much less what kind of bag.
If I stretch the imagination I can envision someone showing me their $2000 bag and me feeling the leather and looking at the workmanship and remarking on how indeed that’s a nice, well made bag.
“What’s this?” Marty asked looking over my shoulder at the bag forum and its pictures of bags.
“Something you don’t even know exists,” I told him.
“You’re right, I don’t,” he said.
Which is one reason we’re together for three decades.
Lynn Yaeger is a serious fashionata who I read is highly respected and people consider her to have an original, artistic, and egalitarian view on fashion, writing intelligently on it.
I’m trying hard here to reconcile $2000 handbags with egalitarian fashion, but am having real troubles doing so, especially with today’s economy and the radical division of wealth, not to mention the status that a genuine name bag confers and the the implication of having made it, which is so much a part of THE BAG as messenger dictating how you should view its carrier as a person of significance. Not to mention viewing them as an individual whose handbag is perhaps worth stealing, not only for its contents but its resale value.
Repeating Lynn Yaeger, she wrote, “If a serious bag once signified that you were a grown-up, now the brand name on your bag signifies what kind of grown-up you are.”
Because Lynn carries expensive bags and confesses to having a closet of them from seasons past, I think what she intended that sentence to read as and how I read it to be two entirely different things and she wouldn’t care for my take on it. On the other hand, I’m confident Lynn Yaeger wouldn’t want to be me, nor would I want her to be me. I still have way too many issues for me to wish myself on anyone else. And I’m pretty certain none of those issues could be mollified by a brand name bag. Which I suppose is more the pity, because absolute peace of mind for the price of a $2000 handbag is really very cheap medicine.
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