Some women are prepared to spend €1,000-plus on a bag. Why has it become the ultimate status symbol, asks Kate Holmquist
The Baguette, the Spy and the Mews are among the most successful consumer items of the Noughties. Kelly, Birkin, Stam, Stephen and Gladys are names that mean little to most people, but are practically sacred to the growing numbers of style-conscious women who have been seduced by the allure of the status handbag. Spending €1,000 and much, much more on a handbag - the amount of a mere meal for four in Patrick Guilbaud's - has become the definitive totem of stylish high-achieving women who want to telegraph their exquisite taste to other women. "I love your bag" has become the preferred conversation-starter at parties, because the clothes now matter far less.
Bag-mad women set their sights on the season's "It" bags before they even hit the shops.
"The customers hear about it before we do. They know their stuff. We get girls aged 18 and upwards scrimping and saving to buy a particular bag, as well as older women who just put it on a credit card," says Pamela Moore, from Clondalkin, who works in the Gucci shop at Brown Thomas in Dublin.
A bag is comforting, useful, ego-boosting - and it doesn't talk back. Bags are social semaphores that broadcast their owner's taste and social position. The bag is the one item of glamour that anyone can have - whether they are old or young, fat or thin. Let's put it this way, any time Kate Moss is seen with a handbag, women come into the store looking for that very bag, says Moore. And you can bet that 99 per cent of them look nothing like Kate Moss.
Partly that's because there's a simple formula for making a handbag irresistible to those who think they can afford it: send the bag as a gift to half a dozen celebrities, then watch as their pictures turn up in magazines such as OK, Heat and Grazia. Make the bag so enormous that it dwarfs the stick-thin celebrity who is carrying it, and you'll be sure that the bag shows up in detail, even with a telephoto lens at 100 paces.
Jimmy Choo's Mahala bag - available in black, red or navy for €1,020 at Brown Thomas - is a case in point. The bag got free publicity around the world when it was seen in the grasp of Kate Hudson, Keira Knightly, Kylie Minogue, Jessica Alba and Beyoncé. Copious, serviceable and structured yet soft, the bag epitomises everything a bag should be: a portable office, make-up carrier, overnight bag and status symbol all in one. "I may be fashionable, but I also have a life," this bag seems to say.
Because bags do talk. Sometimes they whisper and even croon. If you're into bags, you know what I'm talking about. In Brown Thomas, where half the ground floor is taken up by handbags, every bag-maniac will find herself drawn to a particular love-object.
"Some women say that finding the bag is like meeting the man they will marry, that 'they just know'. I'm like that too, but I do have to visit the bag four or five times before I make a decision," says self-confessed handbag addict Melanie Morris, editor of Image magazine, who buys three designer bags per season (that's six a year).
She owns three Balenciaga shoppers - one metallic disco pink, one blue and one black (to carry the lap-top) at about €960 per bag. She has also four Vivienne Westwoods, bought in London for a song at €360 each.
Does she worry about the cost? She puts it on the credit card then forgets about it. "Life's a tight-rope. Don't look down," she says. Her "magic money" theory is that giving up other things such as blow-dries and cappuccinos will ultimately pay for the bag. This season, she's got her eye on a Prada leopard-print pony bag (€1,240 in Brown Thomas), a Miu-Miu "scrunched-up" leather bag with a "bull-dog's face" (€995) and a Chanel, black patent "shopper". She'll get them, she says, even if it means ringing every Prada, Chanel and Miu-Miu outlet in the western hemisphere.
I've never gone that far, but if I could afford it, the bag-equivalent of the man I knew I had to marry it would be - this season, anyway - the 1940s-style structured, lavender-grey Dolce & Gabbana with matte-gilt fittings and red lining, that when opened, seems to effuse the scent of my grandmother's face powder and red lipstick and gives me a glow that I feel down to my toes.
When I admired it, the saleswoman - Pamela Fogarty - immediately sensed that I too was a member of this dark society of handbag-lusters and said in a low voice, "I have one I want you to see . . . do you have any objection to . . . snakeskin?' Into a low drawer she delved until she came out with the cloth bag (all good bags come in cloth bag holders) that held what she called "a very sexy bag". It didn't turn me on that much, but I appreciated her flattering me with her assumption that I was the sort of woman who would appreciate it.
Fogarty, from Castleknock, has about 30 designer bags and has been collecting them since she was 15 years old. Her first was a Louis Vuitton pink patent leather pochette. Three weeks ago, she bought a black half-moon Dolce & Gabbana.
"I love bags - appreciating bags and collecting bags . . . it's bag-porn, and working here I get to be surrounded by it 40 hours per week and meet all the other women who are into bag porn as well," she says. "Some people may think it's insane to spend €1,000 on a bag, but others see that you get a lot of pleasure and use out of it. Women carry their lives in their bag and in the past two to three years, bags have shot up. Irish people tend to go for the label, such as the monogram fabric on a Vuitton or Gucci bag, but they are catching on to the different brands. Prada is rocketing this year. People are appreciating well-made bags that don't have an obvious label."
Women buy bags the way men buy cars and electronic equipment (wide-screen TVs, multi-room digital multi-media systems and so on). They justify their bag purchases by calling them "investments" and emphasising the years of enjoyment that they will get out of them.
Designer Louise Kennedy never buys the latest "It" bag, but believes that classic, hand-crafted bags by Hermes and Louis Vuitton are genuinely great investments because they last forever. "I inherited a crocodile Birkin made in 1958, I continue to use it and it looks better than I do," she says. She has invested in a blonde, calf-skin Birkin and a number of Vuitton epi-leather bags in various colours and all look as new as the day she bought them, she says.
The "Birkin" was designed for actor Jane Birkin, because she needed something stylish to carry her shopping in and, along with the Hermes-designed Kelly bag - named after Grace Kelly - started the fashion for bags with celebrity names. "The frenzy around bags is being created by large, multinational retail companies because a large proportion of their profits come from accessories. Huge investments are being put into the luxury goods companies to create this fetish of bags named after celebrities because it's profitable," she says.
Knowing the bag of the season adds to one's "status". Noel Mahoney, Prada shop manager in Brown Thomas, sells two or three Prada bags per day, including the original black nylon numbers that can be had for €350 and up: but the bag everyone wants is the over-sized ruched leather bag. He says: "We only got a handful of these bags in, to make it exclusive. We've already had a lady coming to Ireland from the UK to buy one because they were sold out over there; an Asian couple bought another. We've got one left."
One of those who snapped up this desirable bag for €1,700 was professional stylist and girl-about-town Lisa Fitzpatrick. This mother of two from Foxrock, Co Dublin, regards her purchase as money well spent. This season's look is to wear understated clothes and carry a gigantic bag strapped across the torso, which may look ridiculous but is "very cool", Fitzpatrick says.
Bag-obsessives will often skimp on clothes, buying that little black dress in Zara then teaming it with a Fendi baguette (available in 600 variations) or Chloe bag. "You can have one simple, black Gucci dress but if you have a selection of great bags and amazing shoes you can wear the same dress 20 or 30 times," Fitzpatrick adds.
Bags are replacing jewellery as the most eye-catching part of an outfit, says Shelley Corkery, director of fashion buying at Brown Thomas, who is in Milan this week viewing the spring-summer 2007 collections. "I adore bags. It's always all about the bag. You are in and out of it every day, it contains everything that is important to you. If women didn't carry bags they would die!"
Corkery buys two or three designer bags every season. "One bag is not good enough. You need a soft bag for loose and long outfits and a more structured bag to go with tailoring."
She regards the several dozen bags in her closet as "investment pieces" that she can use for years to come and even hand down to her four-year-old daughter. Corkery's favourite bag is her classic black leather Birkin bag, which cost thousands but was a gift. "It's like collecting art. There's such a variety of bags now and they are so beautifully made with pochettes and inner zips and places for your mobile phone," she says.
Bag-loving women may say that bags are practical "investments", but the cold eye of a social anthropologist says something different. Jamie Saris, senior lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, says: "It's about the production of self through high-end consumption. You are paying for a distilled version of 'high culture' while also displaying an index of success," he says. Owning a very expensive handbag shows that you have sacrificed certain needs at the altar of capitalism, he believes, which brings us back to Melanie Morris's "magic money" theory.
"It's a kind of magical thinking to believe that a handbag gives you status. Your job may be outsourced, you can't have control in most areas of your life, forces outside your control are controlling society, you can't afford to buy a home, but you can afford this handbag. The expensive bag shows that you have invested in yourself, therefore you are worth investing in," he says.
Over the years, social anthropologists have noticed trends in bags. In the 1980s, the Chanel quilted bag was relatively small, showing that you didn't need a bulging bag full of cash and other accoutrements to keep you going. The current "enormous" bag displays the lifestyle of a woman who is juggling several areas of life and has to be ready to move on at a moment's notice, which makes it a sign of insecurity, rather than solvency (especially if the bag is stuffed with credit card bills).
Saris thinks that such psychobabble has a certain validity, but that, basically, the bag craze in Ireland is a sign of "twenty-somethings with too much money to spend". Maybe that's true to a point, but market analysts have found that the average woman now aspires to owning five handbags at one time - despite her age. And while women will buy their clothing at discount prices, they won't stoop to paying discount prices for handbags. That's because the handbag is a friend, a security blanket - it's in many ways an expression of who you are. No matter how dicey an actor's career and personal life may be, she'll still turn up in the celebrity magazines if she has that special bag.
Call it a fetish or a fashion - whichever way you think of it, the big design houses are convinced that women will keep buying their bags, even if it means wearing Gap and River Island on their bodies.
