The handbag as we know it today, did not really come into vogue until the 1920s, when women began to have a need to carry such items as lipstick, rouge and powder with them, and independent working women began carrying their own money. Prior to this time, the handbag's predecessor, a reticule, a small drawstring bag was carried as a purse by a woman in the Eighteenth Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. The example I have photographed here is from the mid 1920s with a brass frame and chain to hang it around the wrist. Lined with white satin, its exterior is entirely hand beaded with tiny glass beads. A bag like this would have shown off a young lady’s abilities in the domestic arts, such as embroidery – a desirous skill in in a jeune fille à marier (a marriageable young woman) of the 1920s, and probably took several years to complete. Although it has lost a small selection of its beads, this handbag is in remarkably good condition for its age.
I have photographed this example of a beaded ladies handbag against a backdrop of a centrefold from a November 1925 edition of “Le Petit Écho de la Mode”, a French ladies magazine full of fashions, written essays, advertisements for beauty products and needlework ideas. Doubtless the maker of this handbag would have taken the pattern from a magazine similar to this. “Le Petit Écho de la Mode” was launched as a weekly magazine in 1880, with a free model pattern introduced in 1883, by which time it was selling 210,000 copies across France per week. By 1900, when “Le Petit Écho de la Mode” first introduced a colour front page, it had a circulation of over 300,000 per week. Surviving the Second World War, the zenith of the magazine came in 1950, when it had a record circulation of one and half million. After being taken over by their competitor “Femmes d’Aujourd’hui” in 1977, “Le Petit Écho de la Mode” finally ceased publication 104 years after it was first released, in 1984.
The theme for "Looking Close on Friday" on the 3rd of May is "bags". I love to collect vintage accessories, and that includes ladies handbags, and I have a good many examples. When the theme was announced, I was originally going to submit a photograph of an Edwardian reticule made of silk and hand embroidered with flowers on a black velvet background, but then between when the theme was announced and when I took this photo, I acquired two 1920s copies of “Le Petit Écho de la Mode” which I bought for their elegant fashion graphics, so I have opted for this 1920s version instead. I do hope that you like my choice for the theme, and that it makes you smile.
