Greetings all
I am new to vintage
coach products and new to this site and I had a few questions I thought you all might be able to help with.
First, is there a good reference somewhere which shows specifically which vintage coach bags were actually designed by Bonnie Cashin? The way her name is thrown around on ebay auctions it can be hard to tell what is real. I suspect many of those attributions I see are wrong based on the creed and numbers.
Second, is there an online source for older Coach catalogs? It would be very helpful to be able to research the old catalogs myself.
I have done a good bit of searching but it can be hard to find good information among the sea of hype, advertising and commerce surrounding this brand.
BTW, I got into this because I enjoy hunting down and restoring old quality items. I have restored many a vintage hand tool and sewing machine, but now I am also on the lookout for handbags for my wife. Anyway, thanks for the help.
Question one - most "Cashin" bags or styles for sale have little or no connection with Bonnie Cashin. At best they may have been inspired by one of her classic designs but as you found out already, the name Cashin is thrown around by sellers like a Frisbee at a Fourth Of July picnic.
Cashin's design period for Coach (technically she was never employed by them, she worked WITH them but never FOR them as a paid employee) was from 1962 to 1974. As far as most of the research done by some of our forum members has found, Coach didn't start using creeds and serial numbers until AFTER Cashin and Coach parted ways, which means that any bag with a creed and/or serial number was NOT made while Cashin was affiliated with Coach. It's a certainty that the registration or serial number came several years after the stand-alone creed stamp and well after Cashin's departure, so any bag with a serial number can't be a Cashin bag. The only newer bags that can technically use the Cashin name in the description are the "tribute" styles that Coach did several times, mostly after Cashin's death in 2000 and them about 10 years later on a series of bags and accessories that used her design drawings.
Just to confuzzle things a bit, we've seen both "Cashin" and "Cashin-era" descriptions in listings. For most of us here, "Cashin"means an
actual Cashin design. "Cashin-era" could be used to describe a style that Coach's own designers did during the same time period since the in-house design staff and Cashin worked independently of each other and there are vintage designs from as far back as the early 1960s (which is when Coach first added handbags to their line) done by Coach employees that have no connection to Bonnie Cashin.
Just for the record, I'm not a Cashin expert or collector, but questions about Cashin and Coach can also be answered by posters in the Coach Clubhouse forum under the Vintage Coach Photos and Chat subforum
https://forum.purseblog.com/threads/vintage-coach-photos-chat.857690/
Question two - there's no official online source for Coach catalogs. There are a few sellers who have copied a CD that was available on Ebay a few years back from a seller who scanned several dozen old catalogs going back to 1981 which is about as far back as a catalog in the familiar multi-page form existed, but there are one or two dating errors in those files. A few of us have bought older paper catalogs if they were available at a reasonable price, but demand for them has raised the prices to where they're not comfortably affordable for the casual buyer any more.
Both the Vintage Photos and Chat and the Authenticate This Coach forums are very good sources of information. The important thing is to authenticate ALL Coach bag and accessory purchases, because fakes are extremely common and some of them are surprisingly accurate.
Any style made can be faked, and probably has been. Also, never depend on claims made by a seller that a bag has been "professionally authenticated", there are both competant and INcompetant authenticating services.
For related info with the emphasis on classic and vintage Coach, there's a series of 6 Guides that I researched and wrote for Ebay seller "salearea" back in 2011-12 and recently updated and posted here at tPF. They're listed as "Salearea Guides" and Pinned to the top of the Coach Shopping index pages and make (I hope!) interesting reading, with a lot of tips on how to recognise possible or definite fakes and what to expect from genuine Coach products, and
what "information" or "rules" found from other online sources should usually or always be ignored.. The last few posts in that thread are the Daria48 Fake Coach Number Lists which list a few of the most common fake and questionable Coach serial numbers.
https://forum.purseblog.com/threads/salearea-guides.983575/
