Here’s a Dior number from the spring 2016 collection. It’s cute, and it was priced around $4,400. The striking thing, to me, is its size. The “bag” portion of the bag is 5.5″x 6.5″x3.0″.
Dior and other fashion houses are offering similarly small purses this fall for grown women, not six-year-old girls.
We all remember expensive bags from five or 10 years ago — bags so big that they could barely be stuffed into the overhead storage bins of commercial airliners.
Fashion trends come and go, of course, and often excessively. Where in the past the purses were too big, now the new look is bags that are arguably too small.
Another designer theme in these bags is that many are very highly decorated. You see pasted-on sparkles in intricate designs, different colors of leather and other embellishments. Virtually all the very high-end design houses feature them.
Here are couple other fancy bags. Interestingly, given their petite size, they are called “satchels.”
This satchel comes from Les Petits Joueurs and measures 8.3″x7.5’x4″. Yes, it is decorated with Lego bricks, a common theme in the company’s products.
Here is a prettier Fendi Peekaboo Mini Beaded Flower Satchel Bag, priced at $7,250 and sized 7″x 9″x4.3″.
And here are a few other bags, also very small. As for the designers, I am not naming names to protect the guilty.
My dark suspicion is that all the fripperies are added at least in part to frustrate the manufacture of knockoffs in Asia.
The Realistic Look
Let’s face facts. In real life, women carry black purses and maybe switch them out with straw purses in the hot months. The basic is always easy, and it always works.
In the new, smaller handbags, the basic look seems to be this: A neutral-colored bag, almost always with a handy cross-shoulder strap.
Here is one: the Givenchy Antigona Mini Duffel, 7.5″x8.5″x 5.0″ and priced around $2,000. (I know, I know — mini duffel?)
In a way, I should welcome this new look. I have three very small handbags of my own — one sparkly black, one black velvet and one silvery. They all have shoulder straps. I wear them for fancy evenings out when I only need to carry a cellphone, a credit card and lip gloss.
If I only needed to carry a cellphone during the daylight hours, I’d get myself a pair of the still-popular cargo pants with big pockets at the knees.
But that wouldn’t work. Most of the time, I need a handbag that with room for a phone, a wallet, sunglasses and sunblock. (Checkbook not so much, these days.)
These little bags are interesting, but, for me, they just won’t work.
theidiosyncratist 