The cultural significance of the handbag

It is possible, we all know, to learn an awful lot about a woman from what she carries in her handbag. A case in point must surely be the contents of Janis Joplin's, first uncovered in admirable detail in 1972 in David Dalton's Piece of My Heart and, only recently, making ripples across websites including Hairpin (the first to unearth this impressively obscure reference) and Jezebel. "Now where in the hell did I put that lighter...?" Joplin is quoted as wondering. "Probably left it in that bar. I'm real sloppy. Lose more damn things in bars. Left a wallet with a grand in it in a bar last week. Just can't seem to hang on to anything." This, it soon becomes apparent, is not strictly true: in search of the elusive item in question, the singer unceremoniously empties her bag onto her limousine floor. And the ensuing chaos, as Dalton himself puts it, is truly "awesome". "There are two movie stubs, a pack of cigarettes, an antique cigarette holder, several motel and hotel room keys, a box of Kleenex, a compact and various make-up cases – in addition to a bunch of eyebrow pencils held together with a rubber band – an address book, dozens of bits of paper, business cards, matchbox covers with phone numbers written in near-legible bar-room scrawls, guitar picks, a bottle of Southern Comfort (empty), a hip flask, an opened package of complimentary macadamia nuts from American Airlines, cassettes of Johnny Cash and Otis Redding, gum, sunglasses, credit cards, aspirin, assorted pens and writing pad, a corkscrew, an alarm clock, a copy of Time, and two hefty books: Nancy Mitford's biography of Zelda Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel." What a woman. And what a bag, for that matter. Because any receptacle capable of containing such a diverse – not to mention weighty – selection of belongings is a thing of beauty indeed. Joplin's carry-all – in the most literal sense of the words – was, famously, a carpet bag. She once pulled $10,000 in cash out of one and bought herself a Mercedes – a purple one, for the record. Although this particular style is by now most often associated with the 1970s, at which point it was appropriated by any advocate of Flower Power worth his or her credentials, its origins stretch back further than that, to the American Civil War and the Reconstruction period that followed when the cheap, hard-wearing design became a symbol of a nation on the move. It was made out of used carpet, as the name suggests, stretched over a metal frame, and sold for not much more than $1. "Its appearance was a sure sign of a stranger in town and during the Reconstruction the derogatory term 'carpetbagger' was used to describe a profiteer from the North who came to exploit the prostrate, post-bellum South," reads a new book, written by Robert Anderson and courtesy of the Design Museum: Fifty Bags That Changed the World. It's quite a claim. But from Gladstone's Budget Box, a suitably battered affair still carried by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, to the Chanel 2.55 bag and from the humble plastic supermarket carrier to the Fendi Baguette, bags designed to suit each and every purpose have indeed transformed, or at the very least gone a long way towards revealing, the social and cultural mores of the times in which they were conceived.