Bag's Inside and Out: the V&A exhibition looks at the history of the handbag

Bags, Inside and Out at the V&A

In a case of truly unfortunate timing, the week before the Victoria and Albert Museum’s blockbuster show celebrating all things bag related – an exhibition over 18 months in the making, one of the largest ever in a museum, with loans from around the world – was to have opened on 25 April, Britain shut down in response to the coronavirus. The show was postponed.

So far, so normal for global cultural events during the pandemic. But then something unusual started to occur.

As the months of stasis stretched on, the whole concept of the handbag, that repository of stuff and signifier of personality, that accessory that had become so obsessively renewable it drove record-setting profits for numerous fashion brands, began to seem irrelevant. And not just because there were fears when lockdown began that bags could be virus carriers.

What was the point of a bag if no one could go out? Why did we ever think we needed so many of them in the first place? What are we supposed to do with all of those extra totes and purses and clutches? According to data from Euromonitor, a research firm, bag sales this year fell 10 per cent to 28 per cent in every region of the world compared with last year.

Suddenly it seemed as if, with 2020, the age of the handbag might actually have come to an end. With the V&A show, when it happened, if it happened, acting as its obituary.

As if.

This weekend Bags: Inside Out finally opens to the public, and what it suggests is that any rumour of the death of the handbag has been greatly exaggerated.

That, in fact, bags have been intertwined with both male and female identity for centuries, and have survived multiple crises, only to return with even more import. That reports from Dior and Hermès of handbags selling out as stores reopen in Asia and life returns to quasi-normal are actually not anomalies, but part of a historical pattern.

That the news of record vintage handbag auctions at Christie’s, the dominant force in the resale market, which recorded a total of $2,266,750 (£1,712,700) during an online sale in July, including $300,000 for a crocodile Hermès Diamond Himalaya Birkin 25, may be a harbinger of the future. That the hullabaloo on social media last week about Houston Rockets point guard James Harden giving rapper Lil Baby a black Prada nylon duffel bag for his birthday filled with very expensive treats was a sign of the times.

“People kept saying it was the end of bags,” said Lucia Savi, the curator who put the V&A show together. “But bags go hand in hand with humanity. We have always had to carry something.”

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