Funky purses with compartments9/1/2023 The first major problem is that prices have skyrocketed. For many designer brands-and especially those with wide name recognition outside the industry-bags are the business, no matter how many other kinds of products they might produce.įor years, this has been a splendid state of affairs for luxury brands, but things between brands and buyers have lately become a little tense. As a result, handbags are among the most important financial engines of the luxury sector, with a growing global market worth tens of billions of dollars annually. A $3,000 bag is still impossibly expensive for the average person, but it’s something that many, many more people can (and do) mentally justify putting on their credit card than a similarly expensive sweater. (Though as one unfortunate Tinder date learned on the most recent episode of Succession, it is entirely possible to spend three grand on a purse and signal precisely the wrong status, depending on your audience.) Bags are also more practical than party dresses or high heels, and they avoid the fit issues of clothing. They’re what you might call a trophy purchase: something easily recognizable to people who have even a passing interest in fashion, which enhances their desirability as potent status markers. Handbags have a unique place in the fashion industry because they are so ludicrously marketable. What does it mean when people begin to tire of novelty itself? Fashion, as an industry, may have started to butt up against the limits of a buying public that it has pushed to exhaustion. Within this shift in demand, though, is a signal that something larger may be afoot. This shift in consumer desire would be easy to dismiss as a whim of the market-we’re talking about the vagaries of fancy handbags, after all, and fashion is a cyclical business that constantly refers to its own history in new products. Sales of designer bags in “fair” condition, which can have scuffed corners or other highly visible markers of use, nearly doubled in 2022. Demand for like-new versions of recent releases has eased in favor of older, used designs, including those with obvious imperfections. Data from the secondhand luxury marketplace The RealReal suggest that this trend extends across the handbag market. As The New York Times recently noted, some Hermès Birkin buyers are now looking for older, broken-in bags in order to cultivate a more relaxed vibe. Signs of wear on these bags are no dealbreaker. One of fashion’s most basic rules is that nothing is less cool than the recent past, yet here are trendy people parading around like it’s 2015. Instead, many of them are carrying precisely the bags that should be at the nadir of popularity: one-off seasonal releases, designs whose trendiness peaked in the 2010s, and other bags that would otherwise scan as outdated to anyone in the know. These women aren’t merely hunting down vintage styles of historical fashion significance, or the timeless classics that a wealthy mom might pass down to her daughter. A significant-and growing-number of fashion-conscious people appear to be mining the depths of their closets or scouring secondhand marketplaces for designs released in the past decade or so. Over the past year or two, though, something largely unprecedented has been happening on people’s shoulders. For 10 years, these data points informed my obsessive, detailed coverage of the luxury-handbag market. Louis Vuitton Pochette Métis, logo canvas, Hoyt-Schermerhorn subway stop, 40-ish woman. Bottega Veneta Cassette, green padded leather, Soho, 20-something woman. In the brain space that might otherwise be occupied by dear childhood memories or the dates and times of future doctor appointments, I tend to an apparently undeletable mental spreadsheet of who is carrying what. Nearly half a decade has elapsed since I last worked in the fashion industry, but one thing from my previous career remains a compulsion to this day: I look at people’s purses. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
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