Bags & Purses: The Story of Chic and Practicality

By Ida Tomshinsky

The Bags and Purses: The Story of Chic and Practicality, is the seventh book in the popular HISTORY OF FASHION ACCESSORIES series.
This is the story about handbag, an accessory that is carried and that is worn over the shoulders.
Modern day workbags are like jobs, they come with benefits, qualifications, and compensations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514457139

Ida Tomshinsky

Mrs. Ida Tomshinsky, is a long-time Librarian, with a capital “L.” She is kind to share with readers her personal professional story and how she says in the book, “It was an honor and privilege to serve the local communities.” Many people think that the Librarian occupation is in the past, and the Internet and Google can give anyone abundance of information on the fast request. Today, in the modern digital world, we need the librarians’ input more than ever before to guide throughout the getaway of books, digital resources, and “fake” news and facts.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 by Ida Tomshinsky. 733305

ISBN:   Softcover            978-1-5144-5714-6

              EBook                 978-1-5144-5713-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 03/19/2016

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Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgment

About the Author

Establishment of the Handbag as an Essential Fashion Accessory

Advancement Factors for the Essential Fashion Accessory

The New Spiral Twist on the Bag Development in the 2¹st Century

Purses and Handbags Made in the USA

Reference List from A to Z to Handbag Designers and Companies

The Museums, Exhibitions, and Private Collections

The Bag Ladies Diaries

References

Foreword

The modern woman goes out of her home and carries a handbag. The purses and handbags are essential fashion accessories; a little home for storing private attributes. Purses and handbags are these fashion items that people do not wear, but carry on a daily base. Look around, today women cannot live without their purses, either carried for utility or as a status symbol, representing chic and practicality.

The term purse is used in reference to a small bag for holding coins. In British English language, it is still used to refer to a small-size coin bag. For example, the expressions such as control the purse strings or "hold the purse strings" are common remarks to point out who is in charge of the money in the business and in the household.

A handbag is a larger fashion accessory that holds items beyond currency, such as items of personal belongings and emergency items to survive on. As usual, in United States and Canada, people use both terms purse and handbag interchangeably. The term pouch comes from Medieval Latin and associates with words: skin and hide. The term handbag began to appear in written documents around the early 1900s.

Since both men and women have something precious to carry around with them, handbags have been indispensable to the history of fashion and to the history of fashion accessories, specifically. The ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics display people with pouches carried around the waist, perhaps for the safety reasons. The ancient Greek’s and ancient Roman’s art objects exhibit men and women with small pouches in which they carried coins. The pouches were attached to the belt at the waist area and were called byrasa in Greece and bursa in Rome.

We always search for confirmations in the bible’s text. The bible specifically identifies Judas Iscariot as a purse carrier.

The earliest handbags that have been verified historically were small sacks carried by gentlemen containing pomanders [scented spices and oranges], flint and money. They were called ‘pockets’ and were hung by thongs from the back of the girdle. Pockets were often cut and stolen from behind by thieves and were soon nicknamed as ‘cut purse.’

Peasants in early rural societies used small bags to keep and transport seeds, religion items, and medicine. During the days of King Arthur, the legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries; and according to the medieval histories and romances, the housewives carried the various daily life’s necessities with them in bag or in a pouch. In this time in history, the bag was more as an item of a practical enterprise, and was not an item of vivid fun and chic fashion accessory. The woman needed supplies to accompany her in constant daily journeys without running back to the cottage for medicine or religious artifacts.

Historical Facts:

■ In 1991, it was discovered the body of the 5,300-year old human named the Òtzi Iceman in the Swiss-Italian Alps. He had a pouch sewn to his belt that contained a cache of useful items: a scraper, a drill, a flint flake tool, a bone awl, and a dried fungus.

■ Historically speaking, it came out an article entitled Dogtooth is the New Black, in May/June 2012 issue of the Archaeology magazine that discussed a prehistoric bag found in Germany that is 4,200 to 4,500 years-old and may be considered the world’s oldest handbag. However, Alice B. Kehoe states that Germans may not be aware of the bags from Spirit Cave in Nevada, dated to 9,400 years ago. The Spirit Cave bags and the shrouds wrapping corpses are the oldest completely preserved textiles in the world.

Through the years, [the bag] it’s been as small as deck of cards, and as large as a piece of luggage; as soft as velvet, and as hard as Bakelite. It’s been knitted, crocheted, embroidered, beaded and embossed. Hung from the belt, slipped over the fingers, and slung over shoulders; in one form or another, it had been with us since the time of the Crusades. (Levins, 2005)

In history, the little beaded bag was called by many names. Summarizing the information, it’s a fashion accessory used by both men and women since the Middle Ages or medieval period, lasted from the 5th to 15th century: the pocketbook, the purse, and the handbag. The French referred to it sarcastically as ‘the ridicule,’ because who in their right minds would walk around with all their possessions in their hands?! It comes from the Latin word, reticulum, which refers to the small ladies’ net bags from Roman times. The English called it indispensable. In general, the reticules were made from all kind of textiles, quite often in the home industry, but with big enthusiasm and creativity.

In today’s world of the metro-sexuality, it is added one more name, the man bag.

The beaded bags earned its place in the fashion as work of art where art meets fashion, and continue to be cherished by collectors, as the little beaded bag. Beaded bags, whether handcrafted or commercially produced, have been in vogue in North America for more than 200 years and in Europe, for much longer.

The very first mention of a beaded purse in written literature comes from the 14th century. In the late 1300s, the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer described one in The Miller’s Tale, the story of a love affair between an Oxford student and a carpenter’s wife. On the female character he wrote: By her belt hung a purse of leather, tasseled with green and beaded with Italian beads.

From ancient times to today’s haute ‘carryall,’ handbags have been long viewed as symbols of social status and beauty, as well as functional carrying devices. New advances in technology and societal changes continue to affect the ever-changing world of handbags. Let’s browse the handbag timeline to explore the handbag’s passage through history!

Picture a scene of kindness in which a man opens his purse to give alms to a person in need. It was not uncommon to give alms to needy people on the street in the 14th century. In some way, or another, we continue with contributions and charity in present-day time. It is not uncommon in 21st century, to open up our wallets and help people in need. Every year, citizenries in United States make the Back-to-School Drives and donate school backpacks stuffed with school supplies to less fortunate.

From the 16th century forwards, women often wore their purses on a chatelaine. The world chatelaine in French translation means a wife-of-the-Lord-of-a-castle, and has the following meanings: chatelaine, a woman who owns or controls a large house; also chatelaine means a chain or a set of chains on a belt worn by women and men for carrying keys, sewing kit, money, etc.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, and most of the 19th century, women’s clothing was so roomy that one or two bags or pockets could easily be hidden underneath the skirt. Such pockets were usually worn in pairs: one hanging from each hip – hence the name thigh pockets.

These thigh pockets remained in vogue for most of the 19th century.

When the Roman city of Pompeii was discovered in the 18th century, all things found in ancient Greek and Roman became immensely popular. This movement got the name of Classicism that had an intense impact on women’s fashion: dresses became straight and the waistline moved upwards. Underneath these delicate dresses was no room for thigh bags. Their content moved into the reticule, the first true handbag, carried on a chord or chain. Such bags were in fashion until the first decades of the 19th century. Reticules were handmade from all kinds of fabrics, often by the women who used them.

Bags and purses came in a variety of designs for a number of purposes.

From the earliest stages of civilization, bags and purses were practical everyday articles used by men as well as by women. They were necessary for carrying money and other personal items, since clothes hadn’t yet been fitted out with pockets. We know what they looked like from paintings, prints and tapestries and the few historical handbags preserved in museums. Such antique bags are rare because they were mostly made out of perishable materials.

Preface

Featured in fine arts and as regalia in various museums throughout Europe, a variety of bags and purses came into existence in the Middle Ages. Even through purses have been around for centuries, it was not till Victorian era that the purse evolved into the sort of women’s accessory we would recognize today.

In addition to bags and purses for daily use, there were also smaller bags and purses for special purposes: as a marriage bag, toy bag, alms bag, perfumed bag or New Year’s gift, they fulfilled their own special role. (Sigrid Ivo, n. d.)

If we will put a modern day’s woman as the Snow White character from the fairy tale in front of a mirror, she would ask the magic looking-glass: Looking-glass upon the wall, what the fairest purse is for me along? Author’s opinion, the fashion accessories’ idea comes from the fruition accomplishment in the complete outfit. As Charles Dickens put it in writing, any man may be in good spirits and good temper when he’s well dressed. Accessories are literally the flair of the final touches that glamorize feminine gender. Chic bags are without a doubt the fashion accessory of the moment.

Pre-Dating Cleopatra is a Babylonian stone fresco with image of the ‘First purse’ retrieved from (../../tag/babylonian-stone-fresco/), (../../tag/first-purse/) has again and again proved that when it comes to the history of fashion accessories, the ancient Babylon took the lead in innovation.

No arguments, the Egyptians invented so many different articles of body beautification – sunglasses, manicures, perfume, and even the relationship between jewelry on the bodies of the regular folks and jewelry on the clothes of the royals gave birth to the dry cleaning industry; but the Babylonian stone fresco gives us a visual image of a past-perfect purse with a strong handle attached in just right geometric proportions, with strong resemblance to some present-time ideal bag.

Acknowledgment

Certainly, the book is for my parents who infected me with an incurable bibliomania. There is a joke. What would happen if you cross a Librarian and a Lawyer? The answer