TOP LEFT: The J. Garcia Sunburnt range of bags and wallets. ABOVE, FROM TOP: The Sunburnt handbag. J. Garcia Blue Iceberg handbag. The Black Iceberg style. The Black–White Hibiscus handbag. BOTTOM LEFT: The Sunburnt tote bags, in three sizes.

 GOOD [HAND]BAG becomes an intimate extension of the body. A second sex … a belly for concealment [and] a little house for a mobile life.’ So said magazine writer and author Anna Johnson in the introduction of her engrossing, highly educational and entertaining book, Handbags: the Power of the Purse. Ms Johnson, a very good writer indeed, through the photography by Eri Morita and text that flows like a carefully constructed river, takes her reader through the history of the handbag, explains in a light but informative manner how it has evolved over the centuries and how it continues to do so as a result of talented artisans who amazingly come up with new and ingenious ways to expand the vocabulary and collections of women worldwide.
   Psychiatrists see the ladies’ handbag as the ‘only place a man’s hands are unwelcome.’ Surrealists sliced them up and used them in collages and sculptures. And celebrities throughout the ages, by virtue of their perceived power, gives an even more powerful mystique to the handbags they chooses to carry, as seen by Grace Kelly using her Hermès to shield her out-of-wedlock pregnancy before going off to self-imposed exile in Europe.
   The first handbag, explains Ms Johnson, was probably a piece of animal skin held together with string and used by cavemen and women. But that incidental accessory that we all cannot do without evolved into the unisex drawstring purse used by both men and women as early as the Christian Crusades and the Coliseums of Ancient Rome. But, as with most things in history, the handbag achieved its greatest leap of evolution in the Middle Ages when women of means began carrying tiny, embellished “coin” bags as a way of inferring their upper-class status and breeding. Big, bulky shoulder bags worn across the body then implied a hard day’s work and that one was of peasant stock. Even then, it takes very little to heat up class wars between the masses and the rich.

Psychiatrists see the ladies’ handbag as the ‘only place a man’s hands are unwelcome’

   But it did more than that. When the first real leather handbag was created in the 1860s, it was the need for a sturdy travelling bag that drove the trend. That bag was the first to come equipped with a lock, key and a ticket compartment. An unexpected effect was that it gave women some independence from their husbands who were no longer needed to carry their wives’ fans or money.
   As time progressed, many people contributed to the elevation of the handbag as an accessory with a place of importance in history that no one can deny. These artisan–designers, through fate or otherwise, created handbags that have achieved iconic importance and innumerable riches for their companies. Emile-Maurice Hermès created the now famous Kelly Bag, as well as the Birkin (made even more memorable by Kim Cattrall in a fourth season episode of HBO’s Sex and The City, in which she connived to no end to jump the line at New York City’s flagship Hermès store to get her hands on a $5,000 black Birkin). Louis Vuitton, in an effort to thwart the counterfeiters, painted his logo on his bags; and started a trend that is still alive and kicking today. Witness the new line from Marc Jacob’s Louis Vuitton spring 2003 collection (multi-coloured LV logo on solid colour leather background and Coach’s best-selling line (a small c marching across the surface in military lockstep). Coco Chanel, a modern master of fashion design, took the weighted gilt chains out of the hemlines of her suits and fashioned them into shoulder straps for her entry into the handbag derby. It worked like a charm.
   It was in the ’80s and early ’90s that the handbag craze caught fire in a very big way. Miuccia Prada, having taken over her grandfather’s leather factory, leaped to prominence with her first of many iconic cult favorites, a black, ripstop nylon backpack. This opened the floodgates to a new renaissance in handbag design. Ms Prada followed up her opening salvo with other designs in primarily masculine shapes (the lunchbox, the medical bag) in leather, silk, satin and velvet. She ultimately used her dominance in the handbag field to later conquer the rest of the design world.
   But the other players in the industry were not willing to leave all that money on the table without making a run for some of it themselves. Christian Dior came out with the Lady Dior, a confection of overstitching and a cluster of logo letters dangling from the handle. Tom Ford took over as creative Director of Gucci, Inc. in 1992 and one of his first tasks as head of the design team, after first cleaning up the mess left behind by members of the Gucci family, was to reintroduce the Gucci bag to a panting audience. His rendition of the Gucci bag was successful because he took only the best qualities—the bamboo handle, the glossy insignia and the well-known bold striped canvas—and turned around the perception that all things Gucci was schlock and not well-made.

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