Handbags are toting a lot of political baggage these days

http://www.jewishworldreview.com | Politics, like a winter malaise, is capable of overwhelming anything. One moment it's television, the next, religion.

Scratch that. Religion is politics. It's safer to speak of the blue and the red than to wade into the deep waters of organized faith.

Still, who anticipated politics' attacking such a seemingly benign object as the pocketbook?

Within the last decade, handbags have become an outward manifestation of personal insecurity, a symbol of tribal identification, a passkey to the appearance of a better life, a gussied-up badge of desire you can swing.

Basically, they're leather cars. Both are an aperture to personal debt.

The other day I saw a woman shrouded in Louis Vuitton, LVs choking her body like kudzu, reach for the wallet to buy yet more. Judging from her feverish mien, Vuitton was the drug of choice.

I observe a quartet of young women with matching Coach handbags. It's like seventh grade, when best friends called each other the night before to ensure outfits. The items lose their brisk charm when everyone has them. Coach bags, once a sensible alternative to designer swag, have been creeping northward in price, some now $500, while diving whole-hog into the shameless-hussy terrain of logo land. There's no global shortage of leather, yet the prices induce vertigo.

That's what I wish I'd invested in: handbag futures.

As we learn more of people who have so little, we might have curbed our appetite for luxury matter, but that market is booming while the thirst for the prosaic has cooled.

In New York, where street appearance is everything, ladies line the boulevards in dressed-down jeans and tops. What distinguishes them are the handbags. The farther north you travel, the more refined the choices, Coach giving way to Tod's and Bottega Veneta, possessions that profess to whisper their origins but that all players can identify at 50 paces.

Vuitton recently dragged Dooney & Bourke into court over intellectual property rights for producing affordable cartoon-colored handbags for the masses a bit too similar to its fall 2002/spring 2003 Takashi Murakami-designed pieces for which there were once waiting lists, as for some elite school. Jessica Simpson even likened hers to a pet and took it camping.

This summer, a federal court ruled in Dooney & Bourke's favor. Vuitton is appealing the judgment. The suit seems, if you'll pardon the pun, patently absurd because the bags are so last season, and fashion is all about copying. Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld has long appropriated the street for the salon, slapping interlocking C's on accessories resembling everything from Tevas to the odious Ugg.

Meanwhile, the garment industry is attempting to crack down on knockoffs sold on streets the world over, the argument being that they deprive designers of royalties.

The irony is that those handbags are sold by Africans from Manhattan to Rome, people whom princely design houses would never employ except in the back room. We aren't supposed to buy a $30 knockoff that might help put food on an immigrant's table, but instead should purchase the $800 original from a pasha with five palaces.

Of course fashionistas can spot a fake at 50 paces, too. Carry one, and looks from the cognoscenti say "cheap sucker." You'd do better with a paper bag.

This helps explain why fashion editors, the most powerful and terrifying women in this orbit, have given up handbags and totter around with only a cell in manicured paw. Then again, they have minions to carry their stuff. Indeed, if I'm not mistaken, it's a position now listed on the masthead.

In light of all this knowledge, purchasing a handbag is a paralyzing experience because each one says more about us than we'd ever want. The choices are infinite while seeming equally wrong.

Karen Heller is a columnist for Philadelphia Inquirer. Comment by clicking here.

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