Handbags have become rare badges of individuality on the monochromatic urban uniform. And accessory designers are scrambling to decorate us.
By Pilar Guzman
Amy Chan's "medicine ball" bag--which, she says, can also be used as a pillow--embodies her concept of "functional glamour." It's available in nylon (shown) and Irish twill. (photo: Jonathan Kantor)
The Gucci Jackie Bag is back, only this time in orange. And if it's been a while since you last saw your mother, she might very well have traded her Bottega Veneta shoulder number for a Manhattan Portage courier bag with reflective tabs. White is the new black, leather has resurfaced, and Henri Bendel is stocking everything from Cordura Plus nylon "bodypacks" to hot-pink mohair totes. The Dow has no doubt produced greater excesses than the handbag-revival star, the Hermès Kelly Bag, and the debut of the Louis Vuitton dog carrier. But whether you are spending $10,000 on a crocodile item made famous by Princess Grace or $35 on a Crypt J-Bag made famous by New York City bike messengers, 1999 is inarguably the Year of the Handbag. And this summer through fall, depending on the day, you can be both a lady-monarch and Baby Spice.
Why? Khakis. Until the 1990s, simple design was reserved for those with enough old-money insouciance or cultivated modesty to downplay the appearance of success, à la Katharine Hepburn or Charles and Ray Eames. In the last decade, though, by successfully knocking off the Pradas, Armanis, Calvin Kleins, and Arne Jacobsens of the world, companies like the Gap, Club Monaco, Banana Republic, and Pottery Barn have made the classics available to the masses. In this era of democratized and virtually institutionalized good taste, where a Camry looks an awful lot like a BMW, and J. Crew's pleated gray wool skirt might be mistaken for Marc Jacobs' less itchy version, personal flair is harder and harder to achieve. The bag, worn as a complement to the monochromatic urban uniform, has become one of our few means of individual fashion expression. As far as shopping for marks of distinction goes, a mirrored evening bag is a smaller, safer investment than a Humvee. The consumer, then, hungry to do something different with her $100, gives accessory designers great license to experiment with fabric and form, their only constraint being that the handbag must stand out against khaki--and what wouldn't?
But even though there is no need for ultra utility in the prosperous late Nineties, utility is en vogue--a challenge to the inherently frivolous nature of the accessory. The bull-market blessed are buying SUVs to drive up Park Avenue and Viking ranges to reheat take-out dinners. Then there are the fighter-pilot chronograph watches, the Everest-proven outerwear, the indestructible steel office furniture. The urban-commando trend has its roots in fantasy. We suffer from the delusion that our first-world terrain is so rough, our environment so toxic, and our lives so complicated that two-wheel drive and our mothers' purses just won't cut it. Perhaps we have a sense of guilt about our excesses and think that the bionic functionality of our purchases will somehow make us feel better--not extravagant but armed (which might also explain the current World War II fetish). The extra things we're now interested in must at least have the appearance of being functional. That translates into the raw minimalism and blatant impracticality of a white $3,000 Jil Sander lab coat or a $440 laminated-leather Prada waist pack that couldn't hold more than a couple of condoms. In short, prosperity has given us the luxury of morphing accessories with practical origins (at least for scientists and soldiers) into stylish statements that only suggest utility.
According to Steven Alan, owner of the Steven Alan boutique in Soho, the craze for techno and industrial materials--waterproof, treated fabrics that have "an interactive quality"--reflects our desire for a functionality that's also tactile and glamorous. Even the most conservative fashion houses, the ones that traditionally use only the most impractical of leathers, are responding to the trend. "Look at Chanel's [ergonomically correct] molded plastic bags," says Alan. Longchamps, the 50-year-old French purse manufacturer, is doing its double-handled leather bag in nylon with calfskin trim.
This May at Intermix, the annual accessories buyers convention in New York, there were dozens of first-timers displaying their fall wares. In the Year of the Handbag, the question "Yeah, but which bag?" looms large. Is it the sleek millennial bodypack inspired by John Peters' Manhattan Portage messenger classics, the whimsical faux-giraffe totes, or the girly beaded satchels? A crop of new designs, wonderfully ironic pairings of fabric and shape, occupy different places on the glamour-fantasy-utility spectrum: Kelly Bloom's deliciously spare, die-cut sack is a riff on the standard plastic drugstore bag. Amy Chan has made an evening bag--laminated with acetate tiles for a kind of futuristic stain-resistant chain-mail effect--out of traditional African fabric. And then there is Suzan Briganti, who invented what she calls the Push-Up Bag, which is essentially a core of a purse, an interchangeable modular insert ($39--$50) that can be slipped into a line of 500 "shells" ($90--$170) for every occasion.
With the benediction of its prestigious triangular seal, Prada turned nylon into leather in the early 1990s. At $250, the company's backpack made of cheap synthetics in either black or brown was arbitrarily valued at almost the same price as its leather predecessors. Paris-based Ronald Furst, who has been designing bags for the last 25 years for his own line and for Equipment, says, "Prada capitalized on the first generation of adults who had carried Jansport backpacks through college--and some even to their first jobs." Though it's impossible to tell whether it was the worry-free fabric, the nostalgia, or that little triangle of clout that contributed most to the keeping of grown-ups in backpacks, Prada's sporty accessories forever changed our conception of functional chic.
In 1993, between Prada's early nylon success and this season's runway hit, the bodypack, came the vision of husband-and-wife team Andy and Kate Spade: clean but not severe rectangular totes and trapezoidal nylon handbags. With subtly modernized shapes done in nylon--and that minimal yet definitive exterior black label--the Spades challenged the whole industry by not looking to it for design cues. Sick to death of all the ornate or otherwise high-maintenance purses and shoulder bags, Kate explains the design solution she established in her early models: "We took fabrics you wouldn't normally think you can use and made the bags easier to wear--they don't scare people as much." For the Spades, inspiration comes from color and texture first: "We look at beach umbrellas, seersucker jackets, burlap potato sacks, herringbone coats," Andy says. "Fabric before design," Kate blurts out.
By taking the familiar out of context, the Kate Spade bag (which hovers in the $60 to $600 range) has become an accessory staple among a wide spectrum of urban professionals. But if you try to pin Kate Spade to a certain style, it's almost impossible. (Perhaps some combination of mid-century Danish and one-room schoolhouse.) This would explain her appeal to both the Connecticut deb and the downtown hipster. Her bags are solid, optimistic, definitely American. As Andy says, "We're like a pair of Levi's."
It is, of course, this Spadian juxtaposition of fabric and shape that has made it possible for so many others to play with novel pairings. South African--born Kelly Bloom talks about her design mission with a Le Corbusier--like pithiness. "The bag must be large enough and strong enough while still maintaining a certain exterior image," she says. "The bag's form must fit its function and look good." The 29-year-old's love affair with containers began in 1997, when she quit her job in the fashion industry to "see the world with fresh eyes." And so she took off to Southeast Asia for six months with nothing but a trusty North Face backpack. "It made me realize how valuable a container is to mobility," she says. When she returned to New York, Bloom started paying close attention to shopping bags and the multiple carryalls that women schlepp from home to work to the gym and back home again every day. One night, by sewing together nothing more than two pieces of Indonesian batik fabric, Bloom created her signature die-cut-handle handbag. (It now comes in leather, ultrasuede, and even camouflage-parachute, and ranges from $140 to $250.) She refined a common silhouette--that of a drugstore chain's plastic bag--by minimalizing its proportions and crafting it in buttery soft leather. The sack-made-stylish is a reminder not to take everyday design for granted. "For our moms, the handbag had to match the shoes," she says. "For us, it has to adapt to our crazy, busy lives."
Bloom continues to salute industrial classics--she's currently applying the zip-lock closure, which she calls "the most ingenious invention ever," to another minimalist-luxe leather handbag. Similarly, Kate Spade has reinterpreted and improved upon two utilitarian hall-of-famers: L.L. Bean's canvas tote and Klein's workman's canvas tool bag. Spade's adaptation of the Bean classic is trimmer than the original, has a ribbon closure, and is lined in a navy gingham. She has done the Klein tool bag in the unworkman-like colors of light blue and stone.
While both Suzan Briganti and Amy Chan refer figuratively to the handbag as a "tool belt," Briganti's no-nonsense design is about as close to such a holster as it gets; she is the social scientist of handbags. She says that the success of her Push-Up Bag comes from her having watched and listened to women, in focus groups as well as in real life. (According to Briganti's brochure, the name refers to the fact that the bag "just uplifts you.") She elaborates, saying that having a neat bag gives women a sense of empowerment--it is the organizational equivalent of having really great cleavage. Briganti does what she calls "handbag therapy," in which she asks women who own her bags to show her what they carry inside, as well as their loading and unloading techniques. She then offers them suggestions for establishing order. "They gain a whole new outlook on life because they can find their shit," she says. So if Kate Spade is the Levi's 501s of the industry, Suzan Briganti is the women's-cut jeans.
Amy Chan's modern purses--rainstorm-proof, shimmery acetate-tiled bags--embody what she calls "functional glamour." While the tiled bags could accessorize a cyborg, Chan's innovative "bodyware" line also pays homage to the intrepid cowgirl. Take the scrumptious, shearling-lined suede saddlebag that is worn as a shawl. Chan feels that a bag's statement of individuality--one that in her line costs $100 to $310--"is also its functional reason for being. It can exist because it's gorgeous." Chan says about her tile bags, "The fabrication borrows from the mosaic tile and metal mesh [of flapper bags from the Twenties]. The result is a kind of fancy casual that combines the two extremes of something deemed as technical and something considered classic or cultural." In short, something appropriately fin de siècle.
When John Peters, the unwitting pioneer of the hippest container around, founded Manhattan Portage in 1980, he didn't exactly picture Henri Bendel as the backdrop for his messenger bags, which range from $12 to $120. But as soon as high-end accessory designers like Prada and Helmut Lang turned to the street for inspiration, Fifth Avenue establishments suddenly became his business. A lifelong mountaineer, Peters used to make his own gear ("Eastpak watched every move I ever made," he claims). When he loaded up his VW Bug out West and landed in Manhattan, Peters asked the question, "Why can't city dwellers have the same high-tech features and closures as backpackers?" In 1980, he applied Cordura Plus nylon to his shoulder-strap bags. Nowadays, he's justifiably paranoid when a customer comes to his East Village shop three days in a row, studies the new designs, and leaves empty-handed. Though he curses those who have capitalized on his design--"They've already stolen my skyline logo"--he hasn't patented anything. Ultimately he believes, with typical shaggy-climber humility, that his bags are "just functional." Indeed, aside from his varying shapes, closures, and colors (he's created some 400 patterns), Peters hasn't changed the basic formula from year to year. "I'm sticking with the same ballistic nylon I used back in 1983." At least they can't touch his fabric recipe. "Nobody knows my secrets," says the proud Vietnam vet.
Equally impenetrable are Helmut Lang's motorcross-inspired bodypacks. Fingerless, full-length gloves with pouches and one-legged leather chaps with a built-in saddlebag made of supple black suede are the haute couture manifestation of Peters' messenger bags--only without the utility. According to Helmut Lang spokeswoman Hannah Lawrence, these items are meant to accent a fall fashion line that combines traditional with high-tech fabrics, "a collection with technical detailing, utilitarian protection wear." New materials include "anti-stress fabrics that deflect environmental magnetic rays, a cotton-metal-poplin mix, a double-faced foam with a rubberized surface, and a Kevlar nylon." Clothing engineered to protect people and things from mythic hazards blurs the distinction between accessory and clothing, not to mention fantasy and reality. Perhaps people who have the time and environment to be prancing around in single-leg chaps must also need to feel like they have a purpose--and playing space cowboy starts with the right outfit.
In the end, they are all a wonderfully useless homage to utility.
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