40 Fun Facts About Handbags

Which Hermès bag was renamed after a film star turned royal used one to shield her pregnancy from photographers?

Kelly became the bag's name after Grace Kelly, newly married into Monaco's ruling family, was pictured in Life magazine hiding her bump behind it. Hermès had sold the design since the 1930s as a travel handbag.

Which English actress spilled her straw basket beside the head of Hermès on a flight, inspiring a famous bag?

Jane Birkin told Jean-Louis Dumas she could not find a roomy weekend bag she liked, so he made one and named it after her. Her original sold in Paris in 2025 for 8.6 million euros.

Which royal did Dior honour by renaming a handbag Lady Dior after France's first lady gave her one in Paris?

Princess Diana was given the black bag at a Cézanne exhibition and was soon photographed carrying it from Birmingham to Argentina. Relaunched under its new name, it sold 200,000 in two years.

Which Fendi bag, often cited as the first It bag, became a star on Carrie Bradshaw's arm in Sex and the City?

Baguette bags tuck under the arm like the French loaf they are named after. Fendi lent them to the show as props, and the craze helped persuade LVMH to buy into the house in 1999.

In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, the baby Jack Worthing was left in a handbag at which London station?

Victoria Station's cloakroom is where the governess Miss Prism left the bag, having absent-mindedly put her novel manuscript in the pram and the baby in the handbag.

Which British prime minister's bruising style in meetings added the verb 'to handbag' to the English language?

Margaret Thatcher pulled key papers from her bag to show she meant business. The one she said she used every day at Downing Street is now archived at Churchill College, Cambridge.

Which 19th-century travelling bag gave its name to Northerners who moved South after the American Civil War?

Carpet bag luggage was cheap because it was sewn from leftover carpeting. It is also the kind of bag Mary Poppins carries when the east wind blows her to Cherry Tree Lane.

Chemists at Arthur D. Little defied an old proverb by making a silk purse out of which unlikely material?

Sows' ears by the bucketful went into the purse, which the consulting firm made in 1921. The result later joined the Smithsonian's collection.

The oldest known purse, a belt pouch holding flint tools and dried fungus, was found with which prehistoric body?

Ötzi the Iceman lived around 3300 BC and was found in the Alps with the pouch sewn to his belt. He also carried tinder fungus as part of what appears to be a fire-lighting kit.

Which British royal bought more than 200 handbags from the London maker Launer after her mother gave her one?

Queen Elizabeth II gave Launer a royal warrant in 1968 and kept all of her mother's bags too. The firm was started in 1940 by an émigré who had left occupied Czechoslovakia.

Which American first lady gave her nickname to a Gucci handbag that the Florentine house launched in 1961?

Jackie Kennedy lent her name to the Jackie, which Gucci has revived more than once. Founder Guccio Gucci learned what rich travellers liked while handling luggage as a bellhop at London's Savoy Hotel.

Material shortages after the Second World War led Gucci to give a 1947 handbag a handle made of what?

Bamboo was light and could still be had when other materials were scarce. The Bamboo bag became a Gucci signature that later creative directors kept bringing back.

Louis Vuitton's Noé bag was first made in 1932 so that vintners could carry bottles of which drink?

Champagne later joined the family too, when Louis Vuitton merged with Moët et Chandon and Hennessy to form the luxury group LVMH.

Louis Vuitton launched its signature Monogram canvas in 1896 in an attempt to stop which persistent problem?

Counterfeiting was already rife: imitators had pushed the house to create its checked Damier canvas eight years earlier. The patented Monogram worked for a while, but copies returned in the 1920s.

Before handbags made it famous, the Paris house Hermès began in 1837 as a workshop making what?

Horse harnesses and saddles were Thierry Hermès's trade, and the firm's first bag was made for riders to carry their boots and saddle. A horse and carriage still appear in the logo.

The supple leather of early Coach handbags from New York was inspired by which worn-in piece of sports kit?

A baseball glove grows softer and suppler with use, and Miles Cahn worked out a way to treat leather to mimic that. His wife Lillian then suggested the men's accessories workshop try women's bags.

Which American designer quit as accessories chief at Mademoiselle magazine and began selling her own handbags in 1993?

Kate Spade felt the market lacked stylish, sensible, affordable bags, so she and her partner Andy made their own. The business started out with a design called the Sam.

Which French house, named after a Paris racecourse, makes the folding nylon Le Pliage tote?

Longchamp founder Jean Cassegrain could not use his own surname, which relatives already traded under. His firm's early best-sellers were leather-covered pipes, not bags.

Which Milan house turned tough black nylon, once used to cover steamer trunks, into coveted backpacks and totes?

Prada had sold leather goods since 1913, and Miuccia Prada reused the military-grade nylon her grandfather had put over trunks. The waterproof fabric was known as Pocono.

Coco Chanel's quilted 2.55 handbag, with its chain shoulder strap, takes its numeric name from what?

Its creation date, February 1955, became the name 2.55. The chain strap echoed the key chains that caretakers wore at the waist in the convent where Chanel grew up.

Which pouch, whose Gaelic name simply means purse, is worn at the front of a kilt in Scottish Highland dress?

Sporran pouches are a survival of the belt bags that medieval Europeans wore everywhere. The Highlands kept them because the traditional kilt never gained sewn-in storage of its own.

Before handbags caught on, what did women tie around the waist under their skirts to carry scissors, pins and keys?

Pockets were separate tie-on pouches then, which is how Lucy Locket could lose hers in the nursery rhyme. Slim Regency gowns left no room for them underneath, so small bags took over.

In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, who prepares for the Horcrux hunt by filling an enchanted purse with supplies?

Hermione Granger also protects her parents before she leaves, casting a false memory charm so that they believe they are a couple named Wilkins.

Which figure from a 1990s White House scandal went on to sell a line of handbags under her own name?

Monica Lewinsky sold the bags through a company named after herself. She later gave up the line and moved to London to study social psychology.

Shortages during the German occupation of France led Hermès to adopt which colour, now the signature of the house?

Orange was what could be had amid wartime stockouts, and it became the house's official colour. Hermès also brought the zip to French fashion, where it was known as the Hermès fastener.

A gold and garnet purse lid, buried with a hoard of Frankish coins, was unearthed at which Anglo-Saxon site in Suffolk?

Sutton Hoo's purse lid outlasted its leather pouch, which decayed in the royal ship burial. Its garnet plaques show birds of prey seizing smaller birds and men flanked by pairs of wolves.

The rigid-framed leather doctor's bag is named after which four-time British prime minister of the 19th century?

William Gladstone lent his name to the travelling case patented in 1854. Doctors had adopted it by the century's end, and pursers on the Titanic used them to carry valuables.

The slouchy, crescent-shaped hobo bag is named for its likeness to what, carried by wanderers in old cartoons?

A bundle on a stick, known as a bindle, is what the soft, sagging bag recalls. The New York Times named Bobby Breslau's big unstructured leather bag for Halston the handbag of the 1970s.

The English word purse descends, by way of the Latin bursa, from a Greek word for which material?

Animal hide, byrsa in Greek, became the Latin bursa, a leather money bag. The same root gives the Bourse, the Paris stock exchange, whose name literally means purse.

Handbag house, a 1990s British club genre, is said to be named after women doing what on a night out?

Dancing around their bags, set down on the floor, is the usual explanation. The label began as a put-down from underground fans for vocal-led house music that had gone mainstream.

Which Italian house, founded in Vicenza in 1966, made a woven leather technique called intrecciato its signature?

Bottega Veneta got a screen moment in 1980, when Lauren Hutton carried one of its woven bags in American Gigolo. Its main workshop now sits in an 18th-century villa near Vicenza.

Which small drawstring handbag, fashionable from 1795 to 1820, was also known as an indispensable?

Reticule comes from the Latin for a little net, because the first ones were made of netting. Women often sewed their own and trimmed them with embroidery or beads.

Which British designer introduced Dior's asymmetric Saddle bag in a 1999 show inspired by the singer Lauryn Hill?

John Galliano said he had joined Lauryn Hill on stage at her Paris concert the summer before. The bag went on to appear on Carrie Bradshaw's arm in Sex and the City.

Which English model and TV presenter inspired a popular Mulberry bag that carries her first name?

Alexa Chung's namesake bag made its debut in 2010. Mulberry, started in 1971 by Roger Saul and his mother Joan, makes its leather goods at an original Somerset factory called The Rookery.

The inlaid brass Courtauld bag, thought to be the world's oldest surviving handbag, was probably made in which city?

Mosul, in what is now Iraq, is the tentative attribution, around 1300 to 1330 under Mongol Ilkhanate rule. Scholars once took the bag for a man's work basket or document wallet.

Which decorative waist clasp, hung with chains for keys, scissors and thimbles, is named after the mistress of a castle?

Chatelaine first meant the lady of a château, who kept the household keys on her belt. A fashion periodical applied the word to the accessory in 1828.

Which Paris jeweller is credited with inventing the minaudière after seeing a socialite toss make-up into a tin box?

Charles Arpels, of Van Cleef & Arpels, devised the compartmented evening case in the 1930s. Its name is an old French word for a coquettish woman.

Which Budapest-born designer became known for crystal-covered evening bags shaped like penguins, peacocks and cupcakes?

Judith Leiber was the first woman admitted to the Hungarian handbag guild. In New York she gave her sparkling evening bags to presidents' wives from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Coach designer Bonnie Cashin said the toggle clasp on her 1960s handbags was inspired by fastening the top of what?

A convertible car she drove had a top that fastened in a hurry, and the memory gave Coach its hallmark hardware. Cashin also brought coin purses and brighter colours to the range.

Which Liberian-American designer modelled his logo-stamped vegan-leather Shopping Bag on a Bloomingdale's carrier bag?

Telfar Clemens launched the bag in 2014 and put much of his 400,000-dollar prize from a 2017 fashion fund into making more. It became a status symbol at an accessible price.