The handbag in our culture is so ubiquitous and the ranges of handbag styles is so expansive that we may take for granted the history of the handbag or the simpler pouch.  Examples of pouches used to carry objects or goods or money are seen in art from antiquity, such as in the sculpture of Hermes of Thrace found at the Istanbul Archaeological Museum.  Hermes, apart from being the messenger god, was also the god protectorate of commerce and trade and so, aptly, could be depicted carrying a pouch of money.

That a god would be represented carrying a pouch also demonstrates the metaphorical qualities of the pouch.  The idea that a bag serves as a container of things out of reach of others, that it may contain secretive items or objects of untold, perhaps even magical, value is part of its symbolic importance.  The pouch or bag has pragmatic uses but it is never just a pragmatic object, as we can see from the way handbags are adorned today and the industry that revolves around making handbags a hallmark of fashion display and status signifier.

Even in its early history, the pouch was adorned in ways that attested to its transformational potential.  And often it has been the case that a bag’s outer adornment reflects a desire or intention or a meaning beyond its material purpose.  In the middle ages, for example, purses were often exchanged between couples as tokens of love and courtship and the purses themselves would often display embroidered images of lovers in courtship.  This was part of the medieval fashion to celebrate courtly love and romance and a bag with an embroidered image of this would serve to echo a cultural notion of the times.

Today, we continue to attribute symbolism to the purse, most notably in terms of status establishment in the urban experience.  Although men and women would carry pouches during the middle ages, today the handbag is most significantly an accessory for the woman (although the man-purse sometimes makes its appearance.)  The variety of handbags and the pace of rapidly changing trends, compounding to constantly re-define what the “It” bag is, demonstrate how an object can extend its meaning beyond the purely functional to inhabit the space of the symbolic and transformative.

*image-  Hermes of Thrace
*image-  Silk embroidered lovers purse, c.1340

Tags: 1340, 1340 A.D., Fashion History, Hermes, Hermes God, Hermes Thrace Instanbul Archaeological Museum, history gift specials, history of handbags, History of Pouches, history shop, History Store, holiday specials, medieval fashion, Medieval Lovers Purse, Medieval Purse, middle ages, Thrace