Buying a bag is nothing less than a compulsion, a fixation, a tragicomic spectacle, an indication of status anxiety, a sign of existential hope, a fetish, a clue, a puzzlement, a pity, a pleasure. One might even go so far as to conjecture that the British analyst D.W. Winnicott's notion of "potential space" — an imaginative domain between inner and outer worlds that corresponds to the infant's sense of play — finds its most perfect habitation in a handbag. It is, above all, the great unstated answer to the Freudian question: What do women want? Well, I am here to clear away this lingering mystery about the nature of female desire forever: they want bags.
The article goes on to say:
"A bag," observes Wurtzel, "is about controlling the world outside your home. It's not any more about materialism than Neruda's 'Ode to Things' is. When he says, 'Oh irrevocable / river / of things,' he's talking about his attachments, and some of us cannot bear to be separated from our things for too long."
Considered in this light, bags are almost worth the time and money we give them. In being so sublimely iconographic, they tell us nothing less than where we live, who we are and where you might metaphorically someday find us, carrying our best selves in the bag of our secret dreams.
And behold, I'm drooling over my next vessel of secret dreams =) :
No comments:
Post a Comment