Accessories: Bags, Claire Wilcox
This short volume is from the V&A Museum, discussing the trends in fashion for bags and purses, with a bit of an insight into pockets as well. In many ways it’s a very feminine story, since men retained pockets in clothing and haven’t been such targets of fashion for much of the time. It’s a very Western European history of bags, but nonetheless, it’s interesting to see how they developed and what was considered important or essential in a bag through time. The text is descriptive and refers to items from the V&A collection to illustrate their points, photographed beautifully and carefully labelled to help you match up the two.
I’ll admit, some of these bags are just weird to me, which is an entertainment factor all its own — mostly I mean the newer fashionable ones, like the one which looks like a bag of Walkers crisps. Why?!
Fashion. Apparently.
Hah! I have a couple of man bags, though one looks more like those khaki shoulder bags 20C soldiers in the British Army used to wear. But mostly I have a trusty backpack to carry everything in, leaving my pockets for odd paper hanky and my phone—I know my priorities!