The Mystery and Enigma of the Purse

The Mystery and Enigma of the Purse

Modern women’s purses are a thing of mystery and marvel.  They can never be fully understood from the male perspective as they are simply a foreign item of exotic wonder like the Holy Grail.  Although purses, as objects, can be viewed on many levels and layers I truly doubt if they can ever be appreciated and comprehended by a mere mortal man who views the world with his limited man eyes.

 Are purses pure utilitarian or pure art form, or some symbiotic blend of both. For most men they are a taboo to be shunned.  No man in his right mind would be caught, even in a chivalrous moment, holding his wife’s/girl friend’s purse in a public place.  Nor would a man ever dare to retrieve an item from same purse.  The fear is like placing a naked vulnerable hand into a bat cave or a snake pit, fraught with evil and peril.  The social stigmas and risks to manhood are simply too great to calculate or quantify in any meaningful way.

Like any product in the fashion world there are various levels of quality.  Purses in their purest form, like women’s shoes, a separate but related topic, are, or at least should be viewed as art.

On a rare trip to New York my wife and I wandered into several high end boutiques on Fifth Ave looking at everything from shoes, to watches, designer dresses and purses.  My first observation was that it doesn’t matter how rich or poor men are, or whether they are shopping in WalMart or Louis Vuitton none of them really want to be there.  Men as tag-along shoppers are all bored to distraction. There is a common bond between men of all socio-economic strands. I was pleased to discover that being relatively broke or crazy wealthy, neither of which brings any joy to the shopping experience.

Men follow women into these shops like obsolete and sullen hunter gatherers occasionally giving token advice while scouting the landscape for a comfortable place to sit. I have actually heard husbands, totally off their game, saying absurd things like, ‘Yes, dear that purse is slimming.  It definitely doesn’t make you look fat.”

The wife mutters with venomous contempt and disgust, as she walks away, “Idiot, it’s a purse! not a sports bra you moron.”

Any high end store worth its salt uses floor space as if it has no value.  A designer purse is displayed as a one of a kind museum artifact.  Like gourmet food the affect is all in the presentation.  Space abounds.  There are few shoppers in the store the well dressed clerks are bored, yet incredibly condescending, especially if they sense you are not a buyer.

By contrast a WalMart, or any low end retail outlet, will fill ever square foot of display space, to the point it impedes forward motion, then there are additional displays for impulse purchases near the many cash-out tills.  The stores are often crowded the shopping pace is onerous.  It is no longer a gourmet diet this is strictly a fast food regime.  The clerks are not to be found because they are over worked and yet still incredibly rude whether you buy or don’t buy.

I confess to buying jackets when I have any urge to shop.  Why I don’t know. I certainly don’t need any more jackets.  I guess I like variety and see it more like a collection then a need.  So as I watch my wife as she buys yet another purse to replace what looks to me like an identical purse, I say nothing.  Muteness is a survival skill in the world of shopping and purses.

I may have a dozen jackets.  I feel mildly guilty.  I believe, based on sightings in my wife’s closets and from other random sightings, general readings from out dated fashion magazines, idle gossip, and other dubious social media sources, I would wildly estimate that most women have three times the number of purses as I have jackets and that would be a conservative estimate.  Why the need or want for so many purses?

What goes into a purse must be the unasked universal question.  I would hypothesize that there are different purses for different seasons, moods, jobs, colour co-ordinates, functions and whims.  I have seen everything from a tiny clutch purse designed to hold an evenings worth of make-up and easily held in one hand to large voluminous leather sacks in which one could bury their dead.  Purses literally come in all shapes and sizes and for all purposes.  But fun fact did you know the first purses were for men!

Ironic that the first purses, (pre-1700’s), were male accessories and not female.  In fact the age of purses for men can be broken down into two distinct eras: the pre and post pocket.

A man with no pockets had an obvious need to carry the typical articles of the day such as coins of the realm, alms, and other miscellaneous relics.  These purses were usually made of leather, often had numerous secret compartments and were characteristically  worn on the belt like the sporran from the Scottish Highlands. It was both utilitarian and a symbol of  both wealth and status.



After the radical invention of pockets for men the purse was forced into an evolutionary process in order to hold larger items such as books, documents, letters and eventually lap tops for modern metro men.  From that came the briefcase and some sort of reverse de-evolutionary-spin-off event gave us the fanny pack and subsequently this evolutionary branch of men’s purses seems to have gone stagnant.  There is no life after death.



However, on a more verdant plane the future of women’s purses began to soar at about the same time men got their pockets.  Call it coincidence.  I just don’t know.

But. I’m getting ahead of myself.  Let’s flash back a tad.  When men dangled purses from their belts, mainly in aristocratic circles, women did the same.  Theirs were not leather made, rather cheaper cloth versions fastened to the waist with a decorative clasp and chain.  Dangling from the purse, like a modern day janitor’s set of keys, would be an array of domestic utilitarian utensils like scissors, sewing tools and sure more keys. Such purses, called Chatelaines, were considered like jewelry and also a show of wealth and status.

Fast forward to the late 1700 and 1800’s purses became, dare I say, more feminine, smaller, lighter, fastened by draw strings and often embroidered for a personalized touch.  In England they were termed Indispensables due to the content they carried while in France they were called Reticules.  At that time no man alive new what was inside either an Indispensable or a Reticule and no man dared to find out.





Back to men getting their pockets and the Industrial Revolution.  The world in the mid 1840’s was still a man’s world and so perhaps it was no wonder that a man had the opportunity because of typical glass ceilings, gender bias and all the rest and the # movement in its infancy, that a man made the next major break through in purse design and technology.

Yorkshire entrepreneur Samuel Parkinson, of butterscotch confectionary fame and wealth, had the brilliant insight that while traveling, he realized that his wife lacked the necessary means to carry her, well, everything needed for travel.  He commissioned H.J. Cave and Sons to manufacture, according to his suggestions, a range of carrying cases, trunks and travel bags for his dear wife Mrs Parkinson.  Included in the array of carry-alls was the first designer purse.  She was the first to have one.






Guess who took note of this new line of product from Cave and Son, no other than Louis Vuitton (1857) and a very young up start by the name of Guccio Gucci.  There was no turning back!

Although men never knew the contents of purses of the 1800’s we are now gaining some of the preliminary insights of what is now inside a woman’s purse in the modern era.

My own daughter, for example, recently revealed that in her purse, and I have no idea of the volume of purse we are talking about in this example, but I do trust her on the contents which include: a wallet, coins of various denominations, McDonald’s coffee coupons, discount cards, car keys, earphones, planner (quite large).  It has a special place in her heart and therefore her purse...lip balm, tooth brush, tooth paste, dental floss, nasal saline spray, decongestant inhaler, five varieties of essential oilers (obviously important and used to treat various common ailments), Tylenol, Advil, pen, lotion (hand), sanitizer (hand), diaper, wipes and trip specific items.  How this compares to earlier contents of a Chatelaine, Reticule or an Indispensable is only open to speculation

I do know when given permission to get something from my wife’s purse even with instructions like, “Could you hand me my cell phone?”

“Sure where is it,” I answer with I slight tremor in my voice.

“Oh, it’s in the floppy green suede shoulder purse, in the small inside pocket on the right side, of the big pocket, under the flap about a foot and half down on the left side.”

Unless I actually dial her number and listen for the muffled, buried, distinctive ring tone would I have any chance of actually finding her cell phone.

Once during a similar exercise I did pull out a soft black banana, an assortment of almonds and two pairs of sunglasses, her old Blackberry, a pair of mini socks (not a match), some hard candies from a restaurant, a lighter (she doesn’t smoke), a thermos with a collapsable coffee mug, house keys from a house we owned two previous to the one we now live in, a dog collar, (we don’t have pets), several grocery lists and what looked like a partridge in a pear tree.