Handbags: A Love Story

INTRODUCTION

I remember the first time I fell in love . . . with a bag. It was locked away inside a glass tower at Bergdorf Goodman on the main floor. I strolled through, as I usually do every time the seasons and the collections change, and noticed this buttery soft brown hobo with impeccable stitching, a confident slouch, and the most alluring antique-like horn handle attached by simple rings on each side. It was everything I wanted to be: sophisticated, well traveled, exotic. That bag represented all my dreams. I had to have it. The bag was Yves Saint Laurent’s Mombasa, designed by the sexiest of designers, Tom Ford. I went to visit it every day for a week until I finally convinced myself that buying it was more important than paying the rent.

Once I was the proud owner of my first designer bag, I began to notice how many other women had one. I also started to see bags for their color, size, condition, and brand. Designer bags had become my addiction, and I was inducted into a secret society that came with its own silent language spoken between members in knowing nods and glances of approval—in the streets, on the subway, at restaurants.

Men have various trophies—cars, watches—and women have bags. It’s true that bags are practical—they protect our belongings and carry us through the day—but they also reveal taste, power, and status. A gorgeous bag signals to other women what tribe we belong to. Handbags, whether pristine and pricey or worn with character, project who we are and, more often, who we want to be.

After my initial purchase, I wound up adding several more beauties to my stable. I was seduced and enticed by material, stitching, hardware, construction, and silhouette—even zipper teeth! The bags infused luxury into my daily routine, made my heart skip a beat every time I carried them. Often, a woman will catch my eye on the street because of her hair or her clothes or her beauty, but usually it’s because of her handbag. Where did she get it? I wonder. Followed by: I want it, I need it.

So, realizing that I had a problem—I couldn’t afford to plunk down four figures for each bag I wanted—I decided to beat the system. As a fashion photographer who created her own portfolios, I had already begun experimenting with leathers and had a sizable collection of swatches. And in New York you can do anything if you are resourceful. So I designed my first bag, the Trigger, in 2003 and, using the Yellow Pages, found a local manufacturer to help make it.

Slouchy, with zipper accents and tasseled pulls, that bag embodied my downtown mood at the time. Priced at $595, it became a knockout. The formula seems so simple now, affordable luxury, but back then the handbag market was very clear-cut—mass on one side, pricey on the other, and nothing in the middle. Now approachable luxury is a term we hear all the time in fashion and never think about twice, but to this day women still come up to me to tell me that their gateway to designer bags was a Trigger.

Trigger bag, Monica Botkier, Spring 2005.

Monica Botkier

As a handbag designer, I’m always asked about the secret to making a hit bag. If only it were that simple. For starters, timing and being able to gauge the direction of the fashion current are important. In 2000, when Nicolas Ghesquière set about designing his first bag, the Lariat, for Balenciaga, he looked at what was out there and realized that all the bags were with logos and were stiff, very heavy and kind of structured, according to Women’s Wear Daily in 2005. We thought, ‘Why don’t we do a very soft, supple and light bag that is kind of friendly and recognizable without a logo?’ Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez did the same for their PS1 satchel. It was very much about an ‘It Bag,’ explained McCollough to Women’s Wear Daily in 2013. Aesthetically those bags were very much covered in hardware and buckles and logos, and we kind of wanted to do something that was the antithesis . . . something more stripped down and incognito, easy wearing.

The celebrity factor is fashion’s not-so-secret secret. Mary-Kate Olsen helped ignite Alexander Wang’s Rocco, while the tales of Princess Diana and Lady Dior or Jane Birkin and the Hermès namesake have reached almost mythic status. The rise of tabloid culture, celebrity glossies, social media, blogs, and street-style photographers only amplifies the reach now. I’ll confirm it for you here: designers do send the bags out early to editors and bold-faced names to add a little glamorous cachet early on.

Quality is a must, as is a distinguishing feature. Whether it’s allover logos and decorative frippery you can spot a mile away, a quiet yet distinctive silhouette, or a particularly alluring leather, there has to be something recognizable, a calling card that announces, or even whispers, that you’re part of a designer’s inner circle.

There’s a certain balance that hits the eye when a handbag is really well designed—it’s no different than successful architecture or interior design. It captivates and draws you in. Of course, there’s a certain mystery involved, too. Trying to do an It Bag is like doing market research or studies, Marc Jacobs told W in 2005. You can try, but I think you just have to do your own thing. Ultimately, it’s the women who decide whether it’s ‘It’ or it’s not.

What matters is exclusivity and supply versus demand. It’s simply human nature to want what you can’t have. Brands will cap the number of bags they produce each season to avoid oversaturation and stoke the appetite. I remember being advised to retire the Trigger. There are waiting lists—some real, others manufactured—that stir up the urgency to buy. The Hermès wait list is legendary—up to six years, according to a 2015 Fortune report.

Handbags: A Love Story isn’t a history of handbags—there are plenty of great reads out there that trace the lineage, dating back to the 1790s, when women began wearing gauzy Empire dresses and the drawstring purses they previously tied to their waist went solo in the hands. This book is about the handbag as a modern phenomenon that exists in the swirl of desire, style, and aspiration as well as celebrity, marketing, and social-media cachet. Every bag featured here is a fashion and cultural happening, winnowed down from the past twenty-five or so years. But before eagle-eyed observers start quibbling about dates, the earlier styles, such as Chanel’s 2.55 from the 1950s, made the cut because they’re still wholly relevant and ever present.

Handbags focuses on a more modern time frame because that’s the era that begat the It Bag—that must-have, most-wanted fashion creation that can instantly confer and telegraph a certain status and discriminating taste. Sure, covetable high-priced bags go back to the 1950s, when the Hermès Kelly became the Kelly and Coco Chanel added gilt straps to a quilted bag, and the 1970s, when logomania had its first wave—socialite Nan Kempner’s horrified response, as she told Women’s Wear Daily in 1973: I had all my Vuitton painted solid brown in Paris. They nearly died. But it wasn’t until the 1990s, the era of luxury conglomerates, that the handbag became this intoxicating thing that proliferated from city to city and the It Bag notion and name were cemented. The Fendi Baguette, the Prada backpack, and the Kate Spade tote gave way to the monogram madness of Gucci, Dior, and Vuitton, which led to the Balenciaga Lariat, the Chloé Paddington, and the posse of Roxannes, Alexas, Sofias, and Zoes from Mulberry and Marc Jacobs. Between 2002 and 2007 handbag sales surged 139 percent. And that’s what’s on the record—the It Bag is a boon for counterfeiters. Meanwhile, some brands poked fun: Dooney & Bourke named its candy-colored logo bag—the one Vuitton took to court—the It Bag, while Spade, in collaboration with artist Hugo Guinness, created a canvas tote in 2006 with the word it scrawled in the corner.

It Bags eventually fell out of favor when it became a bit of a dirty word. Part of being It is the inevitable countdown to not being It, and countless designers began wordsmithing their way around, tossing out It for the PR-friendly iconic and other romanced alternatives. I think the It Bag is the kiss of death, observed Cameron Silver, founder of the vintage store Decades, in Harper’s Bazaar in 2008.

Yet after every article that rang the death knell for the It Bag—Much like the popular pretty girl who always dies first in a horror film, the It Bag was a victim of its own ambition, reported the Los Angeles Times in 2008—another would pop up, introducing a new trend of discreet, restrained, relatively hardware- and logo-free bags that did the bumping off. And isn’t that really just the same thing? As Tom Ford noted of Bottega Veneta in The New Yorker in 2011, By not doing the It Bag, you do the It Bag.

The idea of It will always be there in some form or another. But nowadays, as handbags become an ever-increasing and ever-essential element of the fashion industry and as women become more educated about what’s out there, there’s a new freedom of choice. Anything goes, really. With the exception of a few houses, women aren’t as brand-loyal anymore. You can have your allover embellishment and indulge your inner minimalist, too—all with a swap of a handbag. It’s about individuality and embracing a woman’s modern, multifaceted life and personality.

Handbags: A Love Story celebrates all those bags that have had the power to quicken our pulse and give us a pang of desire or