evae said:
not really an edit, but i´m looking for an article in THE NEW YORKER, about how handbags are created (or something like that...) just read that trent from pink is the new blog read this article, and he was fascinated. hope you know what i mean and could help me - thx!!!
BAG LADY
The New Yorker
09/25/2006
Andrea Lee
I had a handbag epiphany recently at a literary luncheon in Milan. The occasion was a book launch for Isabel Allende, at a grand apartment behind La Scala, and the high-ceilinged rooms lined with paintings were crammed with writers, a few Italian senators, and a countess. The largely feminine company being the kind of leftist intellectuals who don't dress up, there was little flamboyance in attire, but a glance at one of the couches in the salotto told a different story. Parked there were five enormous crocodile handbags of the latest designer styles--bags as large as Christmas turkeys, groomed and bedizened, glistening and scaly as pet dragons, exuding, in their reptilian complacency, a subtle air of menace. More than a hundred thousand dollars' worth of bag, lined up like Porsches outside a night club.
The sight reminded me that for the past several years we have been living in a gilded age of handbags: a rococo time of profligacy, opulence, heights of stylistic genius and depths of vulgarity, but, above all, a time of exponential proliferation and vitality. Since the turn of the millennium, the role of the handbag has changed from that of a useful but peripheral accessory to the absolute object of desire. Last winter, an English journalist describing London Fashion Week wrote, "Everybody--everybody--is talking about handbags with the intensity of cardinals appointing a new Pope." If each fashion generation has its defining silhouette--the elongated lily shapes of Poiret in the early nineteen hundreds; the shoulder-padded forties and eighties; the full-skirted New Look of the fifties--then the silhouette of the first years of the twenty-first century is sleek and long and linear, with volume added not by a bustle or a big hat but by an enormous, bulging bag.
Designer bags now regularly cost a month's rent. They've spawned their own jargon, from "It bag" and "arm candy" (both already passe) to the current "stealth bag"--an expensive purse made by a lesser-known artisan. Open any fashion magazine and you find pages of bag p*rn, seductively arranged and carefully lit pocketbooks in close-up, overshadowing any accompanying models. In paparazzi shots, celebrities totter under the weight of the latest limited-edition bags like knights displaying their emblems.
Silvia Fendi Venturini is a small, rather shy Roman woman with heavy-lidded eyes and a feline smile that deepens subtly whenever she talks about hammered calf and visible stitching and Plexiglas buckles. Venturini designs acces-sories and menswear for Fendi, S.R.L., the Roman fashion house founded as a leather-goods company back in 1925 by her grandparents Edoardo and Adele Fendi, and brought onto the international stage in the nineteen-sixties and seventies by the five Fendi daughters--Paola, Anna, Franca, Carla, and Alda. Now Venturini, who is Anna's daughter, is the only Fendi family member who designs for the company, which, since 2001, has been part of Bernard Arnault's LVMH luxury-goods empire. She is revered in the industry as the creator of such cult handbags as the Spy, the Ostrik, and last season's B. Fendi. But mostly she is known as the author of the Fendi Baguette, the bag that in the late nineties changed the pocketbook landscape. The Baguette is an oblong bag about the size of a folded newspaper, with a Fendi logo clasp and a short handle, designed to allow the bag to nestle closely under the arm the way Frenchmen (in cartoons, at least) clasp their loaves of daily bread. Like a Petrarchan sonnet, the Baguette form is always the same, but within it the variations are unending: it has appeared in everything from denim to feathers to gemstones. When a mugger demanded Carrie Bradshaw's bag in an episode of "Sex and the City," she corrected him: "It's a Baguette."
The evolution went like this: Back in the eighties, as the bull market was inciting a new era of flashiness, handbags remained strangely timid and restrained. A fashion neophyte, I was acquiring my first designer bags and dreaming of others, and such dreams were simple: one wanted a Kelly or a quilted Chanel, or a bamboo-handled Gucci or something sparkly by Judith Leiber. These bags were certainly expensive, but they were understood to be investments and still carried a matronly aura of rich aunts and bourgeois mothers--they weren't fashionable, not objects of impulse and lust. Then, in the nineties, luxury conglomerates started buying up venerable brands, and Miuccia Prada transformed a boring upper-middle-class Milanese label into a postmodern kingdom, presenting, along the way, a pricy minimalist backpack in black parachute nylon. Young women and their mothers both wanted this bag, which was practical, modest, and eminently cool, and yet it semaphored money--one of the first bags outside the old classics that you could find counterfeited in Hong Kong.
In 1997, Silvia Venturini brought out the Baguette, and it changed the market irrevocably. The Baguette was that rare object that answered perfectly to the spirit of the times, which was a mass hunger for ostentatious display, and also a desire for frivolous treats for women who worked hard at having it all. The Baguette, with its differently colored and elaborately decorated variations, made stylish women dream, like kids with Pokemon cards, of collecting the whole set. Baguettes sold so quickly--a hundred thousand in the first year--that the Fendi workshops in Tuscany could not keep up with the demand. Waiting lists became a fundamental part of status-bag culture. They gave upper-middle-class women the sense of being part of an inner circle of bespoke fashion. To date, Fendi has sold about six hundred thousand Baguettes (average cost: $1,500), and still brings out thirty or forty different versions every year. The Baguette pheno-menon presented new economic opportunities for rival fashion houses, who rushed to pick up on the trend. And so, in a flurry of attention-getting signature bags with cute names, began the twenty-first-century bag wars, the rush of inventiveness and profit that added to the dramatic revival of houses like Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and Christian Dior. (In 2005, leather goods accounted for fifty-four per cent of Gucci's revenues.) In a casual genealogy of turn-of-the-millennium handbags, it could be said that the Baguette begat the Prada bowling bag, the reborn Jackie bag by Gucci, the Saint Laurent Mombasa, the Murakami Louis Vuitton, the Dior Detective, and scores of other bags women all wanted, and bought.
"C'e stata un'overdose di borse"--"There has been a bit of a bag overdose"--Venturini said, one afternoon earlier this year, sitting at her big white worktable upstairs in the nineteenth-century Roman palazzo that is the new Fendi headquarters. "It's quite funny. Everyone thought to copy the Baguette, and now everybody thinks you can support a company with accessories, especially handbags." She had on a gray dress with a brown shahtoosh around her neck, her round face pale and tense, her blond hair pulled back. Venturini doesn't seem to concern herself with the competition. After the Baguette, she produced a series of hit bags, most notably the Spy, with its poufy turban shape and hidden change and lipstick compartments, and the B. Fendi, which looks to become a design classic, with its large sculpted buckles and ladylike handles. That day, she was in the throes of creating a new handbag, hoping to continue her run of hits.
"For the moment, we're calling it the Palazzo bag," she said, gesturing at a brown leather object before her. It looked like a bucket, the size of a child's beach pail, round on the bottom and with a soft drawstring leather top. It was a prototype, the first mockup, a working model of a bag that first existed in Venturini's head, then as a sketch on a computer screen, and then as a paper pattern. An artisan in Fendi's workshop near Florence crafted it by hand. "Perhaps we'll come up with another name when we get right up to the collections in Milan--that's when we are more relaxed and discover the real character, the identity of a handbag." She laughed. "Now there is no time to think about names. Now there is a lot of pressure. A really crazy moment."
On this particular afternoon, the piano nobile of the palazzo was full of buyers and managers from the worldwide network of a hundred and twenty-five Fendi shops, visiting Rome to preview the fall collections. The first two floors house the company's flagship store, the executive offices are on three, and the top two floors contain the airy design studios. (Karl Lagerfeld, who designs Fendi's women's pret-a-porter and its furs, sweeps in often, like a black-winged angel.) Throughout, there's a feeling that Italians call sopra la bottega--the family atmosphere in a place where everybody is crowded together above the shop and working to make it a success.
