by Dana Thomas
THROUGHOUT the centuries, men and women have carried their belongings in some sort of bag. When the five-thousand-year-old remains of a man, known as “Frozen Fritz,” were found in the ice of the Tyrolean Alps in 1991, researchers discovered that sewn onto his calfskin belt was a pouch containing small tools made of stone, lime wood, bone, and horn. In Greece, schoolchildren kept their knucklebone games in bags. In Rome, women carried small net pouches called reticula, and they were ridiculed for carrying their pockets in their hands. In the Middle Ages, there were drawstring alms purses. In China, Buddhist monks and pilgrims carried small pouches of amulets and icons. African medicine men kept their divining ossicles in pouches, and nomads throughout the world used bags to transport their possessions on the backs of their camels and horses. During the late eighteenth century, European women wore diaphanous high-waisted dresses without pockets and carried their essentials in small sacks that are now considered the forebears to the handbag. In the late nineteenth century, when sewing and embroidery were social activities, ladies of the upper classes had ornate sewing bags to carry their needles and thread. Carrying anything more than that was seen as socially inferior: that’s why one had staff.
The modern handbag was born in the early twentieth century with the emergence of suffragettes. The handbag was “the sign of a new independence, that of coming and going at will, of being able to leave home without answering to anyone,” writes Farid Chenoune in Carried Away: All About Bags. The handbag quickly became an essential accessory for the average consumer. “It’s so infuriating, this lack of pockets in skirts that are too close-fitting,” wrote one observer in Fémina magazine back in 1908. “All the precious things you lose—purse, notebook, handkerchief—that you end up resigned to the handbag, day and night. Wealthy women are still holding out—they can put all their bits and pieces in the car; but the others have made up their minds and the current thing is the handbag.” With the arrival of the slim “flapper” silhouette, handbags became an essential fashion accessory. In the 1930s, couturiers began to quietly replace their customers’ initials with their own, thus launching the practice of displaying luxury brand logos.
By the time Diana Vreeland joined Harper’s Bazaar in 1937 as a junior editor, handbags had become an integral and important part of the fashion business, as she would quickly learn. Shortly after she arrived at the august glossy, Vreeland had what she described in her memoir, D.V., as a “brainwave!”
“We’re going to eliminate all handbags,” she told a colleague.
“You’re going to what?” he responded.
“Eliminate all handbags,” she repeated. “Now look. What have I got here? I’ve got cigarettes, I’ve got my lipstick, I’ve got my comb, I’ve got my powder, I’ve got my rouge, I’ve got my money. But what do I want with a bloody old handbag that one leaves in taxis and so on? It should all go into pockets. Real pockets, like a man has, for goodness sake.”
Then Vreeland explained how she wanted to devote an entire issue of the venerable fashion magazine to “showing what you can do with pockets and how the silhouette is improved and so on.”
Her colleague ran from her office—“the way you run for the police!” she recalled—straight to Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow.
“Diana’s going crazy!” he cried. “Get hold of her.”
Snow went to see Vreeland.
“Listen, Diana,” Snow told Vreeland, “I think you’ve lost your mind. Do you realize that our income from handbag advertising is God knows how many millions a year?!”
During World War II, handbags became simple and practical, like the leather backpack and the “game bag,” a largish sac worn across the torso so that one could ride a bicycle easily, the preferred method of transportation during gasoline rationing. After the war, designers embraced an array of interesting new materials such as plastic, Plexiglass, raffia, and straw. In 1947, Gucci introduced a spare U-shaped handbag made of gleaming black cowhide with a handle made of bamboo, a material that was cheap and abundant. In February 1955, Chanel launched its now-iconic 2.55 (named for the launch date), the rectangle-shaped quilted leather bag with a fold-over flap and gold-chain shoulder strap. It had no monogram; the interlocking Cs were sewn inside. Not long after, the Kelly came into vogue, thanks to Princess Grace.
During the feminist movement of the late 1960s, all the accessories that for centuries had been essential items in a woman’s wardrobe—the hat, the parasol, the gloves, the muff—disappeared. All that remained was the baby of the lot, the handbag, and it moved up the arm to the shoulder, freeing up a woman’s hands as she liberated her mind and her soul. “We’ve got into the habit of using just one bag right around the clock,” reported the French fashion magazine Jardins des Modes. “No more changing the color to go with the clothes, no more matching sets—bag, gloves, shoes, and so on. You fine-tune your bag with what you’re wearing by adjusting the length of the strap.”
As women joined the workforce in droves in the 1980s, they found they needed a bag that could go from day to evening and could work as a briefcase, too—and they had the disposable income to spend to get a good one. They needed something classic, something that wasn’t too flashy, that wouldn’t undermine their desire to be taken seriously in a man’s world. And since a good leather handbag was a hefty investment, women preferred a design that wouldn’t go out of fashion too quickly.
Luxury brands had the answer. At Chanel, executives decided to push the thirty-year-old quilted 2.55 bag. “I remember being in all those meetings when we said we have to get aggressive about selling handbags,” Arie Kopelman, former CEO of Chanel Inc., the company’s American affiliate, told me. “You can drive the business with accessories, you can advertise it easily, you can promote it in many ways, and we said, ‘How can we make this happen in the greatest way possible and really go after the business?’ It was a product line that really needed a tremendous push to capitalize on the opportunity.”
Kopelman was among those at Chanel who wanted to do a big ad campaign promoting the 2.55 and other similar bags. It was a bold move, since back then, as Kopelman pointed out, “[Chanel] didn’t really advertise except for perfume and cosmetics.” To the French, advertising fashion was considered tacky: “You don’t do that” was the standard response. But Kopelman, a former ad man who had worked for the advertising giant Doyle Dane Bernbach for twenty years before joining Chanel, helped to convince his colleagues otherwise. The ad campaign ran, and Chanel handbag sales took off. “It was clearly a terrific market opportunity,” Kopelman told me. “We jumped on a trend and made the most of it.” Each season, Chanel reissued the 2.55 in new bold colors and materials. Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld reinterpreted the 2.55’s chain strap as a belt slung around the hips and the quilting pattern was used for everything from down-filled coats to a stamped impression on eye shadow. In 1986, Lagerfeld designed a magnificent couture evening gown embroidered with a trompe l’oeil inspired by the quilted 2.55.
At Hermès, Dumas reinvigorated the eighty-year-old Kelly. He expanded the range from dark tones to a rainbow of colors and in a variety of leathers and featured it in a snappy ad campaign. “He released the Kelly from its conservative past,” de Bazelaire said. “Shook it up. Put it in front of the scene.” Sales exploded. Waiting lists started, and they’ve never abated.
One day in 1984 on an Air France flight from Paris to London, British actress Jane Birkin pulled her Hermès datebook out of her bag and—whoosh—all her papers fell out all over the floor. She groused as she scooped them up about how the book needed a pocket. Beside her sat Jean-Louis Dumas.
“Let me take yours and let’s see what we can do,” he said.
A few weeks later, Birkin received her datebook with a pocket stitched inside the cover.
“Now they all have pockets!” she told me when she recounted the story. “Isn’t it marvelous?”
During that same flight, Birkin grumbled to Dumas—she had his attention after all—that there wasn’t a
good leather weekend bag for women, “one that isn’t too big, or too heavy when it’s full of stuff,” she explained.
“What would you want it to look like?” he asked.
She described it to him.
Not long after, a big package arrived at her flat. It was a leather weekend bag, just as she had imagined it. Dumas had adapted the haut à courroies to Birkin’s specs and dubbed it the Birkin.
“You and Grace Kelly are the only ones with Hermès bags named in your honor,” he told her.
HERMÈS’S BIRKIN and Kelly were big hits with the rich set, and the Chanel’s 2.55 with the working woman—I remember when I was writing about fashion for the Washington Post, seeing the power lawyers and lobbyists on K Street with their quilted bags dangling from chains on their shoulders. But what was the young or average-income woman who wanted to be fashionable to do? I was in my twenties at the time and, though I had a good job, I shared an apartment with a roommate to make rent. I wrote about Chanel, but I shopped at the Gap. My one luxury fashion item was Chanel No. 5, but the cheapest level: eau de toilette spray. Yes, I was buying into the dream. But I wondered: How could I and my friends, most also in low-paying, starting-level jobs, be a part of the world of luxury fashion that we read about in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, beyond perfume? And how could we do it without looking like those conservative lobbyists and lawyers?
The answer sat quietly in an eighty-year-old mahogany-and-glass display case in Milan, waiting to be discovered. When Miuccia Prada took over her grandfather’s company in 1978, she didn’t want to reissue a design made famous by Grace Kelly or Audrey Hepburn or Jackie Kennedy. She wanted to do new designs. Nothing at Prada would be old. She began exploring the use of different fabrics and designs and came up with a backpack made of nylon parachute fabric trimmed in leather. She had it made on sewing machines that made parachutes for the Italian army and it came in two colors: black and brown.
It didn’t sell for a while. “No one wanted the backpack because it didn’t scream luxury,” Prada told me when I met with her in 2006. It was anonymous and simple. As Holly Brubach wrote in the New Yorker in 1990, “These were upstart bags: by their design they demanded to be taken seriously, but they were made of a material that, according to most people’s taste at the time, undermined their credibility. Real bags, the sort of bags people were proud to carry, came in leather or crocodile or silk, not nylon.” Fashion editors urged Prada to put the company’s initials on the sack like Chanel or Gucci did to give it more cachet, but she refused. She had always hated logos on luxury items when she was growing up. Instead, she chose to use the tiny triangle label that her grandfather affixed on trunks. It was in black enamel, with the name Fratelli Prada, a crown that signified that the company was an official supplier to the Italian royal family and “Milano.” Miuccia added a line stating that the company was founded in 1913 to validate its place among luxury brands, and attached it to the flap of the backpack.
The backpack finally got its close-up in 1988. Prada showed her first collection of women’s wear, and when editors and retailers stopped by the showroom to review and order the clothes, they came upon the backpack. The next season it popped up in small articles in the glossies and on department store shelves. Prada increased the buzz by sending backpacks to key editors as a Christmas present. “Then it hit,” remembers fashion public relations executive Karla Otto, who worked with Prada at the time. “It was everywhere.”
The Prada backpack was the ultimate “It” bag for the average consumer: it was hip, modern, lightweight, and at $450 far less expensive than finely tooled leather bags like the Kelly and the 2.55. Prada backpacks were so popular that New York Times street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham stood on the corner of Fifty-seventh Street and Fifth Avenue one afternoon, shooting women walking by with the sacks slung over their shoulders, the little triangle with PRADA written neatly in an exclusive serif typeface designed for the company’s logo stuck on the flap for everyone to see. The Prada backpack became the handbag design of the moment: every brand had a version. The backpack sold like crazy, made the company a fortune, and turned Prada into a household name. All the while, Miuccia Prada sat in her studio and cringed. “She hated seeing certain women carrying her handbags,” recalls Leslie Johnsen, who worked as Prada’s director for public relations for North America in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, Prada’s husband and company CEO, Patrizio Bertelli, sat in his office and plotted the company’s global expansion, funded with backpack sales.
The Prada backpack, in fact, unknowingly became the emblem of the radical change that luxury was undergoing at the time: the shift from small family businesses of beautifully handcrafted goods to global corporations selling to the middle market. When Tom Ford took over the creative direction of Gucci in 1994, he saw the potential of the youth market in luxury fashion and pushed handbags into the forefront. Models would come marching down the runway of his Gucci women’s wear shows in Milan to the hip-hop sounds of Lauryn Hill or Fatboy Slim, dressed in sexy black satin suits or white liquid jersey columns, clutching or wearing a fantastic new Gucci bag. Soon fashion editors were reporting not only on Ford’s new clothes but also on the new bags. The phenomenal sales of Ford’s bags pulled Gucci out of near bankruptcy and helped underwrite its global expansion. “Tom Ford made beautiful dresses, but he always stuck a great bag on them,” said Claus Lindorff of BETC Luxe. “How many $2,000 white satin gowns are you going to sell? Luxury brands know that clothing is a loss. The bag is the introduction to a brand. Even if it’s a ready-to-wear ad campaign, what you are really selling is the handbag. Thanks to Tom Ford, prêt-à-porter is the decor for the accessory.”
So essential is the handbag in the success of a luxury brand today that Gucci Group attributed the disappointing figures at Yves Saint Laurent in 2005 to the fact that the brand hadn’t had a hit bag in a couple of seasons. And Yves Saint Laurent was, at least until Gucci Group took it over in 1999, a fashion house, not a leather goods company. In 2006, Gucci Group was still supporting its fledgling fashion brands, Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney. But as Lindorff said, “It’s not going to be clothes that make those brands work. Those designers are being told, ‘Get a bloody handbag out there that will sell well.’”
It was an “It” bag that turned Fendi from a dowdy old fur company into a top-tier luxury fashion brand. Back in 1997, Fendi’s accessories designer Silvia Fendi Venturini came up with the Baguette, a little, soft oblong pouch on a short shoulder strap that nestles comfortably under the arm. It sold out in a matter of months and soon had a long waiting list, including for the $5,000 version made of silk handwoven in the Manifattura Lisio in Florence. All together, Fendi sold more than a hundred thousand Baguettes the first year. It became such an important fashion item that it was written into an episode of Sex and the City: when a mugger ordered Carrie Bradshaw to hand over her purse, she responded, “It’s a Baguette.”
Venturini kept coming up with new spins on it—in denim, or covered in sea pearls—and stuck it on the arms of models showing Fendi’s women’s wear, which has been designed by Karl Lagerfeld since 1965. The Baguette gave the house such a financial and fashion boost that by the fall of 1999, the luxury barons were fighting over it. Gucci, Prada, Bulgari, and LVMH all tried to buy the company, first founded by Venturini’s grandmother Adele Casagrande in 1918—she married Edoardo Fendi in 1925—and run since 1954 by their five daughters. In the end LVMH teamed up with Prada and bought 51 percent of Fendi for $520 million—valuing the entire company at nearly $1 billion. Some of Fendi’s suitors complained during negotiations that Bernard Arnault and Prada’s Patrizio Bertelli wanted to pay too much for Fendi. “They’re throwing money around like drunken sailors,” one remarked at the time.
By 2001, the Baguette was over. Bertelli wisely sold Prada’s 25 percent back to LVMH for $260 million, and over the years LVMH acquired more shares from the Fendi family, for a total of 94 percent in 2007. For years LVMH has poured money into Fendi—hir
ing über–luxury brand architect Peter Marino for a costly renovation of the Rome store, opening more than thirty new free-standing stores in less than four years, buying back dozens of licenses—but by 2005, it was still in the red. Market sources estimated that Fendi lost approximately $31.2 million in 2004. Meanwhile, Silvia Fendi Venturini and her team offer several new designs each season, hoping one will be “It.”
TO MEET THE increasing demand for handbags they had created, luxury brands had to come up with innovative solutions. Hermès stuck with its limited distribution. For Dumas, it was a question of integrity: the heart of Hermès was fine traditional craftsmanship, and to sacrifice that would undermine the brand. The other major—and minor—luxury brands looked for ways to produce more goods faster and more efficiently. Louis Vuitton expanded its production, adding workshops in France and moving some manufacturing to the Loewe factory in Spain. When I visited the special-orders atelier in Asnières, I got a glimpse of how Louis Vuitton makes its bags: seamstresses sat behind sewing machines, stitching together scores of the new denim monogram handbag. Unlike at Hermès, where bags were crafted by hand one at a time, at Vuitton, the workers were churning them out assembly-line style, in twenty-bag batches. Vuitton executives may crow about quality, but the company’s focus is obviously on productivity.
Gucci, on the other hand, went high-tech. In March 2004, I visited Gucci factory headquarters near Florence a few weeks before Tom Ford and Domenico De Sole—and much of the team that worked with them—left the company, to see how Gucci handbags were made. My guide was Gucci’s product development director, Alessandro Poggiolini, an affable and polite man in his sixties who had joined Gucci in 1967 as a handbag artisan. (He retired from the company in 2005.) The original Gucci factory, Poggiolini told me, was on the river Arno in Florence. Later it moved to Via della Caldaie, in the city center, and in 1971 it moved to an industrial park called Casellina di Scandicci, about half an hour outside the city.