Fyi, the
New York Times ran a review of this book today...
November 19, 2006
Books of Style
If You Cant Speak Softly, Carry a Big Bag
By
LIESL SCHILLINGER
ITS IN THE BAG
What Purses Reveal and Conceal.
By Winifred Gallagher.
128 pp. Harper Collins.
$19.95.
ITS official: spending thousands of dollars on accessories is not frivolous. Just ask a Tibetan Buddhist. Tenzin Palmo may live in a Himalayan nunnery, but shes not shocked at the very idea of spending $1,200 for an It bag, Winifred Gallagher writes in Its In the Bag, her jaunty meditation on the apotheosis of the designer handbag. Still, Tenzin Palmo does not carry a
Marc Jacobs Stam, much less an Hermès Birkin. She completes her look with a unisex monastic jholla shoulder bag, economical, roomy and ideal for a modern woman whose work requires global travel.
For busy women who do not live on mountaintops and who are not nuns, the choice of handbag is fraught these days, sending signals of status, taste and identity that others instantly interpret. Bags help them suss out whos their kind of person and whos not, the fashion historian Valerie Steele tells the author. You can wear jeans and cowboy boots, but as long as you carry a $2,000 bag, people will place you where you want to be placed. Ms. Gallagher dates the bag-as-icon trend to the rise of Miuccia
Prada and to the emergence of must-have bags like the Birkin in the late 80s. As recently as the 60s, she writes, fashionable women labored to create color-coordinated outfits the couture answer to Garanimals. Though the purse matched the outfit, it didnt make it. But lately, the put-together look is fashion anathema. Clare Sauro, the accessories curator at the
Fashion Institute of Technologys fashion museum, explains: Now the goal is to look like youve just thrown yourself together and dont really care. A $25,000
Gucci alligator bag reassures the world that, secretly, you do.
Ms. Gallagher has interviewed numerous designers, fashionistas and opinionated purse-carriers with humorously divergent tastes. For the quirky London bagmaker Anya Hindmarch, creator of the elegant, simple $8,750 crocodile Bespoke Ebury, a handbag helps you to be a sexy femme fatale, or a sleek, powerful businesswoman, or a hippie chick to play different roles, really. The late
Ann Richards, once the governor of Texas, was so convinced that a purse for a woman is like a toolbox for a carpenter that she had hers custom-made in Italy. Tonne Goodman, the fashion director of Vogue, can risk insouciance. She carries a rather battered 10-year-old black Prada, and says, Personally, purses are not important to me. (Twit her if you dare.)
So why are many women paying as much for handbags as some people pay for cars? Ms. Gallagher offers a psychological explanation: overworked, emotionally starved and unlucky in love, they seek the security blanket of the perfect leather sidekick. There are not enough men to go around, the psychology professor Judith Waters tells her. That purse tells her, Look, youre doing the right thing because your career has enabled you to get a $2,000 bag. An It bag, unlike a man, will stay by your side throughout an 18-hour workday.
