Women still need stylish portmanteaux for their femininity, but are the prices starting to bite?, writes ANN MARIE HOURIHANE
THE HANDBAG is dying, and that is bad news for us all. You may regard handbags as belonging firmly in the realm of frippery - which of course they do - but they are an important cultural and economic indicator. It is therefore significant that the handbag, the harbinger of bling itself, is now being relegated to the top shelf of fashion. No less a person than Miuccia Prada has said: "The obsession with handbags has finished a little now. It feels over. It's about shoes." The shocking part of it is that shoes are actually useful, much more difficult to copy cheaply and, most of the time in this part of the world, necessary. The decline of the designer handbag is a sign that the cash is drying up.
In Brown Thomas, it has to be said, it doesn't look like that, not at all. I counted eight handbag outlets on the ground floor and they were just the ones that had their names emblazoned on boutique-like shopfronts. Chloe, Dolce & Gabbana, Fendi, Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Hermes (yes!) and Chanel. We are not counting Mulberry, DKNY, Miu Miu or Marni, which have gathered, in an altogether lower key, in the centre of the floor near the Wicklow Street entrance.
Naturally, with the cold winds of recession blasting through the ribcage of the Irish economy, one would have expected the crowds in the handbag section to be pretty thin. But, on the contrary, there were plenty of people in there, if not buying then at least making minute enquiries about prices.
The Chloe bags - the handbag equivalent of the hi-viz vest - shone like little suns in the late spring gloom: one of the white ones cost €1,350. Over at Hermes, a nice girl explained that a blue Bolide was €4,160. Well, they came to mock and stayed to pray. I lost my heart to a Marni cross body shopper in burgundy, priced at €1,045, and simply darling. It was unrequited love.
The word "handbags" now means several things, from the posturing of rugby players pretending to fight, to the television panel discussions where journalists pretend that we know what is going to happen at the moment and also what is going to happen in the future. (Friday night's Late Late Showhad an excellent example of handbags: it was a three-way.) But your actual handbag still says a lot.
Before it inflated into the fashion equivalent of a 4x4, a handbag used to be a discreet accessory which allowed its owner to carry her purse, her lipstick and her handkerchief. The queen of England would be very much of this school - without the purse, obviously.
And the fact that Carla Bruni, on her official visit to London last week, carried a vintage-style handbag which could have been filched from the queen any time over the past 50 years was very telling. Carla was making a valiant attempt to look like the kind of girl who carries only her purse, her lipstick and her handkerchief, whereas we all know that she is actually the sort of girl who carries a slouch bag - even a cross body shopper - and God only knows what's in it. Carla's clutch bag for evening was similarly suspect.
The handbag used to be very private. In this country, rosary beads once nestled at the bottom of handbags or in their precious inside pockets. Then, during the heroin epidemics of the 1980s, it was said that redoubtable old ladies started to carry bricks in their handbags - with which to whack muggers.
The writer Clare Boylan once said that the big difference between her and the younger generation of women was that young women did not carry handbags. They were going to march through their lives unencumbered by feminine detail.
How little we knew. As the diffusion ranges hit the high street, the big name designers realised that the handbag was a highly recognisable item that could be carried by any female, regardless of her weight and age.
The handbag went public. It became a consumer fetish, weighed down by its own gold charms, asphyxiated by its ruching, and it came in colours so bright that if you held on to it long enough a rescue helicopter would swoop down and winch you to safety. Instead of being called after movie stars - the Kelly, the Birkin - the new handbag was called after a toy, for example, Chloe's Paddington. You could swop them on eBay, like Barbies.
Earlier this year, Mintel came out with a prediction that there will be a strong downturn in the sales of designer handbags in the next five years, and that the designer handbag's place will be taken by the designer shoe.
Perhaps this news has not reached these shores yet. Or perhaps we still have more money than anybody else. In these days of financial uncertainty, you could do worse than watch the Chloe counter.