I've had it with handbags, vagina symbols or not | Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

Emma Hill's shock departure from Mulberry, a brand most famous for its 800 "it bags", has got me thinking about women's handbags, and not for the first time. As a woman, I have always spent a large proportion of my day thinking about handbags. When I'm not thinking about them, I'm thinking about my vagina

OpinionHandbags This article is more than 10 years old

I've had it with handbags, vagina symbols or not

This article is more than 10 years oldI disagree with Freud – handbags are heavy wastebins that make pigs of us all, let's make like Emma Hill and escape their tyranny

Emma Hill's shock departure from Mulberry, a brand most famous for its £800 "it bags", has got me thinking about women's handbags, and not for the first time. As a woman, I have always spent a large proportion of my day thinking about handbags. When I'm not thinking about them, I'm thinking about my vagina – or shoes, or underarm cellulite, or aromatherapy – but mostly I think about handbags. So imagine the relief when I read that Freud thought of handbags as vaginal symbols, much in the same way that a gun was a dream symbol for the penis. By combining two of my favourite topics, it has really helped to free up some mental energy for other things.

The past 10 years has seen the rise and rise of the "it" bag, an ascent that began some time around the Chloe Paddington (a grotesque concoction of lambs' leather and heavy brass dangly bits) and culminated with Mulberry's efforts, most of which are named after style icons (or their vaginas?), and, as "it" bags go, tend towards the simple, classic end of the spectrum (not that this affects the eye-watering price tags).

The luxury handbag market has been expanding ever since Hermès introduced the Kelly and the Birkin bags (named after Grace Kelly and Jane Birkin's respective vaginas), both of which demand price tags in excess of £10,000, even requiring a waiting list. As far as this is concerned, I'm inclined to agree with the late great Nora Ephron, who wrote in her famous essay I Hate My Purse: "On the waiting list! For a purse! For a $10,000 purse that will end up full of old Tic Tacs!" A two-year waiting list for a vagina, and still no guarantee.

As someone who is of the Lady Bracknell school of thought, whose best nights out have involved the carrying of nothing more than a debit card (overdrawn) and a packet of fags in the pocket of a faux-fur coat, the sheer size and clout of the current handbag styles does absolutely nothing for me. Forget Tic Tacs, from the looks of the ubiquitous "what's in my handbag?" features in lady magazines and the woman interminably rummaging while standing in front of you in the queue for the Post Office like a foul-mouthed Mary Poppins, you're expected to shunt your whole life around in them. I'm not sure what this says about our vaginas, but it certainly says something about fashion.

This is where I part ways with Herr Freud. These modern handbags are a void that consumes everything around them, and despite what men's rights activists may argue, the same cannot be said of vaginas. They are the dark matter of modern fashion retail. Through the medium of billboards and magazines, they attempt to consume our brains like buttery soft, tan flesh-eating zombies, but once you've finally got your grubby little mitts on one you find that they devour not only everything you own but also time itself. This is true of the knock-off versions also. Assuming that, at some point thousands of years in the distant future, aliens finally work out how to observe us through a gigantic telescope, they'd see me, spending most of 2011 rummaging for my dole book, swearing.

I've had it with handbags. As Ephron also pointed out, their heaviness renders you increasingly immobile, while men can wander the surface of this planet unfettered and free. "If one of your hands is stuck carrying your purse," she wrote, "it means it's not free for all sorts of exciting things you could be using it for, like shoving your way through crowds, throwing your arms around loved ones, climbing the greasy pole to success and waving madly for taxis."

Perhaps this, in these most liberated days, is why women are turning their backs on luxury bags; it's simply too much baggage. A while ago I asked the women of the internet to send me a description of the contents of their bags. The results were, quite frankly, disgusting. Once you realise that those monumentally expensive sheaths contain all manner of dark and alarming secrets, ranging from mushy half-eaten bananas to used tampons ("there was no bin!") to stool samples, diaphragms and dirty nappies, the sheen of exclusive glamour is lost. We are pigs, and handbags merely serve to encourage our pigginess, and, as feminists, we need to be liberated from them once and for all.

Unless, of course, you're talking about the beautiful quilted Chanel 2.55 in black and gold, a bag-vagina hybrid so glorious that, if I could, I'd go down on it. In which case, you can go to hell.

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