The Fame Lunches by Daphne Merkin

Author:Daphne Merkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374711924
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

IV

HIGHER VALUES

WHEN A BAG IS NOT JUST A BAG

2006

It is the Thursday evening before New Year’s Eve, a time when most equably minded people are busy laying in the champagne and taking stock of their lives. Or reading on a chaise somewhere pretty and tropical, nibbling on papaya, or perhaps skiing down a white slope in Aspen, Colorado, with the wind behind them. On this day you would have found me scurrying along Madison Avenue on my way to Barneys, the metropolitan mecca of all that is fabulously new and covetable, to return two bags. The items in question were a characteristically whimsical Marni evening pouch that had cost this side of $800—and that I had originally planned on carrying to a nephew’s bar mitzvah to offset a stark, synagogue-appropriate St. John Knits ensemble but in the end decided against, in favor of a borrowed and less contrapuntal Lambertson Truex lizard clutch—and an uncharacteristically unconstructed Jil Sander number ($670) that had briefly spoken to me in my continuing search for an Edenic black bag. It goes without saying that neither one was a strictly necessary purchase (what bag after the first one is?) and that they were about far, far more than themselves.

The mania for bags—an irrational passion if ever there was one—defines our acquisition-mad cultural moment as surely as the tulip fever that raged through seventeenth-century Holland defined the burghers of Amsterdam. Put it another way: we may have lost our moral bearings in these centerless and often incoherent times, but we know what bag we want to carry our bearings in should we ever find them again. Where shoes once reigned supreme as the dominant wardrobe accessory, bags now lead the way as the top fashion signifier. A woman’s bag also serves as the portable manifestation of her sense of self, a detailed and remarkably revealing map of her interior, an omnium-gatherum of myriad aspects of her life—the crucial Filofaxed information as well as the frivolous, lipsticky stuff.

Last fall, as if to underscore the point, the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery in London staged I Want to Be a Bag, by Alessandra Vesi, featuring sewn, crocheted, and glued constructions that were like visual puns made delightfully concrete. As Anna Johnson suggests in her witty introduction to Handbags: The Power of the Purse, “a good bag becomes an intimate extension of the body,” which is why an astute female reader will realize that Anna Karenina is about to end it all when she tosses aside her red handbag. “A woman who is sick of her handbag,” Johnson observes, “surely, is absolutely sick of living.” (This explains, as well, why Diana Vreeland’s unappeasable dislike of this accessory and her dictum to “ban the bag” were wisely ignored by designers and why, when Tom Ford suggested in a recent interview that the hippest thing a girl can do is carry no bag at all, he instantly revealed the limits of his understanding of what makes women tick.) “The only way I know

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