More on Fashion and/or Style

Until I was about forty, I was a strict one-purse-er, refusing to indulge in an array of bags for many occasions.  I did keep a tiny purse on hand for Saturday night use (a cheap and ugly thing, but it was never the focus of my ensembles), but for every day, I had one shoulder bag and one only, period.  Of course, over the years, one bag might be replaced after a time – but I was definitely, explicitly, and perhaps even indignantly a serial monobagist.

This silliness/practicality was born of a childhood spent wondering where the coupons were.  Indeed, a life.  My mom, possessed of one of the most remarkable minds I ever knew – who could remember everything about a person she’d met once twenty years ago – who could raise me and my brother, and more than hold her own personally, professionally, and socially – was a purse-changer.

I never saw the point of multi-purse behavior.  What I saw was the inevitable consequence of change:  loss and unavailability.  I saw the shopping trips with the “wrong” credit cards, or the missing checkbook (I lived in the Age of Checks, little ones … it was a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …).  I saw receipts we “knew” we had, when going to return something, miraculously vanished.

I saw nightmares of which perhaps it is best I do not speak …

And so, I saw one single black purse as entirely sufficient unto any day.  In the 90s, this often consisted of those glorified wallets – bags with twenty little card and money slots, and a driver’s license clear-vinyl-windowed flappy-do in the flap closure, and a little space for lipstick, comb, and Blistex DCT.  With stuuuuuuuuuuuuuuupidly long straps, usually connected to the body by clamps to d-rings.  As they were.

By the 2000s, I shifted cards and cash and insurance and so on onto an actual wallet, ans so my purses changed in nature – but, in function, they still had to be workhorses.

It was shortly before I got my previous job that I found the I Santi.  It’s an Italian leather bag of the most magical proportions, look, and function.  Its strap drop (distance from the body of the purse to the top of the strap) is enough to make it a *shoulder* bag (I had a loathing, when giant hobo bags with tiny straps were coming to be the thing, of seeing women lose an arm to ridiculously large purses they could not carry exept crooked in the elbow).  Its body is structured, but not hard.  It’s slender, but long enough that it holds a great deal.

It’s a black Italian leather designer bag from a maker most of whose works sell for a MINIMUM of $300.  Of course, I paid no such thing (a case of an eBay seller with something they didn’t know the value of – perhaps a gift they didn’t like, nor care what they got for it) – and I got myself a quite nice little bag out of it.  Beautiful for everything from a job interview to a Sunday at the grocery.

And so, it is ironic that this is the bag that finally broke me.

This, and of coure, the burgeoning obsession with vintage accessories.

I came to feel that this bag was so good I wanted to be sure I did not knock it around as I had all those pleather confections of the eighties and nineties.  I wanted it to last – and I wanted to indulge in grown up purses.  I wanted something to go with *brown* shoes.  I wanted to dare that beast I’d submitted to all my life – the fear of pursine consequences.  I wanted to find out whether life was possible with multiple purses and without kerfuffle over credit cards and coupons.  I also saw a writer I knew at the JRW Conference with the most DARLING little red vintage bag, and from that day was lost to my one-purse fidelity.

And so, for fun, one day I was eBay browsing the granny purses … ahhh, and there the little devil was.  A sky blue patent barrel bag which looked like even grandma had only carried it one Sunday in the sixties – for Easter at church, or who knows what.  I nabbed it.

Since then, I have nabbed two navy purses, a matched pair of Lenox doctor bags (one cherry red, one brown), a vinyl-covered ivory jacquard, the tiny fuschia and the tiny black patent, a Japanese pearl-pink straw, an awesome bronze vinyl folio, a giant black doctor bag with lipstick-red leather lining, and two carpet bags I depend on at conferences (big enough for my Galaxy, hard-sided enough to use as desks).  Oh, and there are others.  There is the aqua velvet.  The little flowered dark-magenta I carried when I became a member of my church.  The tiny, adorable grey.

The beautiful brown lizard box purse my mom gave me, which had been hers back when she met my dad.

The little silver treasure chest, the century-old velvet drawstring with actual-metal thread embroidery.

The tiny patent box purse that holds the most amazing amount of stuff.

Today, with my sophisticated grey and blue ensemble, I have my amusingly cute and remarkably capacious little navy leather granny purse.



As a side note to all the little vintage babies I’ve taken on, about two years ago I bought a Basic Black Bag to take heat off the I Santi, because even with all this variety, there’s still the grocery store – and there is still the fact that I don’t change purses every single day.  (When I do, by the way – I have largely avoided my mom’s Dreaded Consequences by dint of always, always UPENDING MY BAG completely when I go to change from one to another, and individually handling each item which goes into the new bag, just to reassure myself all is accounted for).

The new basic black bag is a Beijo (begin your raspberries now, if you like all the Bs there), and I’ve been struck by one thing since having it – this purse, specifically intended and definitely used as an everyday knockabout, bought used, and never polished (it’s patent) nor treated with special solicitude, gets almost as many compliments as any one I own.  I use it more than the rest of course, so it gets seen the most – but, even in its ordinary condition (I have a higher-end Beijo of the same design I protect like the I Santi and the vintage cuties), a week does not go by that some woman doesn’t comment on what a great purse it is.  I think even men have complimented the thing.

It’s a good size, for one – similar to the I Santi, it is slender enough to fit under the shoulder, and the strap drop is long enough you can carry it there.  It’s also a noticeable shape.  The design is called “Over the Moon” (for my readers looking for a bag, it’s always to be found on eBay, new and used, at prices ranging from about ten bucks up to sixty – and in a pretty vast array of colors; mine happen to be black patent and a coppery-salmon pearl patent), and its upper curve does call to mind the crescent moon.  If you are looking for a purse, it's recommended - certainly it gets attention, and if you like that it's a go-er.