Handbags
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40 free Handbags trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
A handbag is one of the few things people carry every day that can also be a museum piece, a political prop or a punchline. Some of the most famous designs got their names by accident, after a chance meeting or a single photograph, and a few have sold for more than a house. This quiz covers the best-known bags from Hermès, Chanel, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Dior, Fendi and Coach, the designers and famous owners behind them, and the styles every shopper half-knows. It also reaches back to medieval pouches, Regency drawstring bags and the oldest purses ever found, and takes in handbags in novels, plays, club culture and politics. It suits fashion fans, vintage collectors and anyone planning a quiz night or a purse-themed party. Most questions can be reasoned out from a clue in the wording, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Hermès bag was renamed after a film star turned royal used one to shield her pregnancy from photographers?
Kelly
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.
Q 02Which English actress spilled her straw basket beside the head of Hermès on a flight, inspiring a famous bag?
Jane Birkin
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.
Q 03Which royal did Dior honour by renaming a handbag Lady Dior after France's first lady gave her one in Paris?
Princess Diana
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.
Q 04Which Fendi bag, often cited as the first It bag, became a star on Carrie Bradshaw's arm in Sex and the City?
Baguette
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.
Q 05In Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest, the baby Jack Worthing was left in a handbag at which London station?
Victoria
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.
Q 06Which British prime minister's bruising style in meetings added the verb 'to handbag' to the English language?
Margaret Thatcher
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.
Q 07Which 19th-century travelling bag gave its name to Northerners who moved South after the American Civil War?
Carpet bag
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.
Q 08Chemists at Arthur D. Little defied an old proverb by making a silk purse out of which unlikely material?
Sows' ears
Sows' ears by the bucketful went into the purse, which the consulting firm made in 1921. The result later joined the Smithsonian's collection.
Q 09The oldest known purse, a belt pouch holding flint tools and dried fungus, was found with which prehistoric body?
Ötzi the Iceman
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.
Q 10Which British royal bought more than 200 handbags from the London maker Launer after her mother gave her one?
Queen Elizabeth II
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.
Q 11Which American first lady gave her nickname to a Gucci handbag that the Florentine house launched in 1961?
Jackie Kennedy
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.
Q 12Material shortages after the Second World War led Gucci to give a 1947 handbag a handle made of what?
Bamboo
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.
Q 13Louis Vuitton's Noé bag was first made in 1932 so that vintners could carry bottles of which drink?
Champagne
Q 21Which pouch, whose Gaelic name simply means purse, is worn at the front of a kilt in Scottish Highland dress?
Sporran
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.
Q 22Before handbags caught on, what did women tie around the waist under their skirts to carry scissors, pins and keys?
Pockets
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.
Q 23In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, who prepares for the Horcrux hunt by filling an enchanted purse with supplies?
Hermione Granger
Champagne later joined the family too, when Louis Vuitton merged with Moët et Chandon and Hennessy to form the luxury group LVMH.
Q 14Louis Vuitton launched its signature Monogram canvas in 1896 in an attempt to stop which persistent problem?
Counterfeiting
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.
Q 15Before handbags made it famous, the Paris house Hermès began in 1837 as a workshop making what?
Horse harnesses
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.
Q 16The supple leather of early Coach handbags from New York was inspired by which worn-in piece of sports kit?
A baseball glove
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.
Q 17Which American designer quit as accessories chief at Mademoiselle magazine and began selling her own handbags in 1993?
Kate Spade
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.
Q 18Which French house, named after a Paris racecourse, makes the folding nylon Le Pliage tote?
Longchamp
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.
Q 19Which Milan house turned tough black nylon, once used to cover steamer trunks, into coveted backpacks and totes?
Prada
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.
Q 20Coco Chanel's quilted 2.55 handbag, with its chain shoulder strap, takes its numeric name from what?
Its creation date
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.
Hermione Granger also protects her parents before she leaves, casting a false memory charm so that they believe they are a couple named Wilkins.
Q 24Which figure from a 1990s White House scandal went on to sell a line of handbags under her own name?
Monica Lewinsky
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.
Q 25Shortages during the German occupation of France led Hermès to adopt which colour, now the signature of the house?
Orange
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.
Q 26A gold and garnet purse lid, buried with a hoard of Frankish coins, was unearthed at which Anglo-Saxon site in Suffolk?
Sutton Hoo
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.
Q 27The rigid-framed leather doctor's bag is named after which four-time British prime minister of the 19th century?
William Gladstone
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.
Q 28The slouchy, crescent-shaped hobo bag is named for its likeness to what, carried by wanderers in old cartoons?
A bundle on a stick
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.
Q 29The English word purse descends, by way of the Latin bursa, from a Greek word for which material?
Animal hide
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.
Q 30Handbag house, a 1990s British club genre, is said to be named after women doing what on a night out?
Dancing around their bags
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.