Rise of the 'IT Bag'

Carried away

Fashion used to be about clothes. Now, it seems, women would rather splash out on expensive designer handbags - like this £760 bestseller from Marc Jacobs. Hadley Freeman investigates the rise and rise of the 'It bag'

Wednesday November 22, 2006
The Guardian UK




Earlier this year, something rather seismic happened in the world of retail. On a quiet street in west London, a boutique moved its front door. Tom Chapman, owner of the designer chain store Matches, decided that, after several years of the front door opening into the clothing department, it needed to be moved a crucial couple of yards to the left in order to open into the shoes, bags and sunglasses. A minor adjustment, certainly, but this architectural shift reflects and echoes one in the fashion industry: clothing is now the afterthought; it's bags and shoes that come first. "There's been a real shift to accessories for customers and so I realised that it was important for the customer to be confronted with a lovely big wall of shoes and bags as soon as they come in, like sweets in a jar," says Chapman. It's no surprise that he is so keen to celebrate his "lovely big wall": in just two years, his total profits from those sweets has doubled.


According to Mintel, the accessories business, particularly handbags, is the fastest growing sector of the luxury fashion market, "outperforming the other aspects of the market with ease". Claudia d'Arpizio, a partner at the consultancy Bain & Co Inc, was quoted on the Dow Jones newswires last month as saying that the leather goods market alone grew to €15.5bn (£10bn) last year, up from €11.9bn in 2001 and far exceeding growth in the overall luxury market.

The current trend for oversized bags, goggle-like sunglasses and clumping great wedges and boots reflects the way accessories have become the main focus. Next season's catwalks were filled with more of the same: bags decked with clanging chain handles, so large you could carry your child in them, owlish shades, and tottering wedges and platforms causing more than one Naomi Campbell-esque catwalk tumble. At the Louis Vuitton show, one of the bags was simply printed with images of other Vuitton bags, apparently the most aspirational image that designer Marc Jacobs could think of. A headline in the International Herald Tribune above a story reviewing Paris fashion week simply read: "Baubles, bangles and bags: Who cares about the clothes?"

There is now even a slew of websites in the US, including Bagborroworsteal.com and Frombagstoriches.com, where people unwilling to pay £1,500 for a bag can hire one for an evening or so, reflecting the levels of desire handbags have acquired.

Cosmetics, in particular perfume, have long been seen as the oxygen that keeps the fashion industry afloat, mopping up the clothing sector's frequent heavy losses with its more commercial affordability. But although perfume is still a £15bn annual industry, it has become tainted with tacky duty-free associations and sales have been slowing dramatically: for the past two years the sector has grown only by about 3% worldwide, whereas the bags sector is predicted to grow at about 11% over the next five years. According to Cathy Horyn, fashion editor of the New York Times: "Accessories are absolutely the new perfume." Last month, Versace credited its accessories for pushing the company back into profitability after last year's losses.

Just 10 to 15 years ago, the words "designer handbag" were redolent of bouffanted stuffy Sloanes, clutching on to their Chanel quilted bags as they lunched at Le Caprice. Now, announcements heralding this season's It bags make front covers of fashion and gossip magazines, and news of which bag Kate Moss or Sienna Miller is carrying this season causes mass waiting lists. Ask a woman why she would shy away from spending £700 on, say, a Balenciaga jacket but will save up for a similarly priced Balenciaga bag and you get the same answers: you use shoes and bags more than a jacket, accessories don't make you feel fat, you don't have to bother with a changing room to try on accessories in a store, they go with everything and dress up everything.

"I can buy clothes for work, parties and weekends on the high street, which is great. But I then want something, like a bag, to lift my look above that of my friends' teenage daughters, and I can afford it as I save on clothes," says Teresa Lawson, 39, who recently bought a £900 Mulberry bag. "Because high-street clothes are so good it seems profligate to buy designer clothes. But to invest in an amazing bag somehow feels clever because you can't get that kind of quality from Zara. I save up for them, so it feels like a real treat, which is not a feeling I get from Mango, or wherever," agrees Ellen Hoffman, a lawyer who earns £35,000 a year and admits to one Gucci bag (£600), one from Chloé (£800) and a growing yen for a Chanel handbag (£1,000). But none of these is exactly a new development, so what started this trend?

First, there was the emergence in the late 90s of designer brands - such as Marc Jacobs, Chloé, Balenciaga and Luella - that targeted younger customers and made the accessories to match. Sofia Coppola featured in the adverts for Jacobs' bags and he named one after her. This naming of bags has also proved to be a clever and successful tactic as it gives the bags a kind of identity and it is now done by almost all fashion companies. Luella and Marc Jacobs name their bags after models and celebrities (respectively, Giselle and Stam, after the model Jessica Stam) while Mulberry and Chloé give their bags names that conjure images of sassy, if imaginary, women (respectively, Roxy and Edith).

As just the names of the Hermès Kelly and Birkin bags prove, celebrity endorsement of an accessory isn't anything new. What is new, though, is the numbers of bags competing for the endorsement, with every season bringing more, and the fact that they are aimed at younger celebrities and, by extension, younger customers. "Bags and shoes are everything in fashion now. At the shows [in Paris last month] I saw about 20 different new It bags," says Rachel Zoe, the celebrity stylist who has particularly encouraged the accessories craze, thanks to her penchant for oversized bags and sunglasses now sported by her clients including Keira Knightley, Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Richie.

Stuart Vevers designs the successful accessories division of the British label Luella and is the creative director of one of the biggest accessories success stories of the decade, Mulberry, which last year increased sales by 44% and whose first US shop opens in New York next week. But even he admits to being taken aback by how sharply accessories sales have risen: "I was really surprised when this craze took off a few years ago. There have always been successful handbags but British women didn't seem to have that desire for high-end bags before. Maybe it has something to do with the way women dress, in that now they dress much more casually so a designer bag has become a way to show that you are fashionable."

Every designer brand is, to use the industry parlance, focusing on their accessories. Bulgari, best known for jewellery, announced last month that it was doubling its accessories stores by the end of this year. Chloé and Balenciaga have made dozens of bag styles for this season. Alice Temperley, the British designer best known for floaty dresses and delicate blouses has launched a line of bags and sunglasses for next season costing on average, respectively, £700 and £178. "The bag business is very different from what it used to be. It's so much faster, faster, faster, and the bag you carry has become a statement. If you are building a brand then branching into accessories is definitely something you have to consider as these create a stronger brand image," she says.

The linking of accessories with fashion and a company's brand image has also played a part. It was Tom Ford in the 90s who first realised that in order for an accessories line to be desirable, it had to be connected to clothes. When he was creative director of Gucci he emphasised the previously all-but-ignored clothing line of the house, which had been known primarily for its accessories. It is a telling sign, though, that after Ford left Gucci and was under pressure to start up his own successful line, instead of launching a menswear line, as was widely rumoured, he brought out a range of sunglasses.

Fashion houses are happy to own up to the fact that accessories are an important part of their business. Prada concedes that they made up 63% of last year's profits, Gucci owns up to 54.3%, but they try not to make them sound too important, as that will give away the game that the brand is actually more about accessories than clothes and therefore detract from the brand name's cachet. "If you focus too much on the accessories you risk losing the image but at the same time, in terms of business, you really want to focus on the accessories," says Tomaso Galli, Prada's director of external relations. In other words, the clothes give the bags the image but the bags earn the money to make the clothes.

Traditional accessories labels, such as Louis Vuitton and Hermès, have made huge investments in their fashion divisions, installing respectively Marc Jacobs and Jean Paul Gaultier to give their bags and shoes the kind of high-fashion sheen that accessories need these days, but it is widely accepted that clothing accounts for only a small amount of their annual revenue. Many industry insiders suggest that some big brands massage their accessories sales figures downwards and the clothing ones up. "Everyone knows that most Italian labels make their money from leather goods, some up to 90%," said one fashion editor who asked not to be named.

Accessories have always been a key part of the fashion industry, now they dominate. Last spring's Prada show featured models in simple clothes dragging great wheelie luggage down the catwalk. At the Chanel show in Paris, Karl Lagerfeld seemed to have been so distracted by making gold, quilted bags and hulking great shoes that he forgot half the clothes, leaving the models with nothing to wear on their bottom halves other than hotpants. But then, what's the point in bothering to design a tweed skirt when you know that what everyone's really going to be looking at is the bag? "It's not that we don't concentrate on our ready-to-wear - we do invest in it and grow it - but accessories are more profitable," says Galli.

The appeal of accessories for retailers is obvious: on pretty much every level, they are easier to sell and more lucrative. "The margins are always better with accessories than clothes. You don't have to think about sizes, you need less space to store them than you do with clothes, you don't need as much space to show them off in shops and you don't need changing rooms," Galli points out. "For us, handbags have the highest margins because our sunglasses are licensed [to another company] but their margins are good, too."

Now that accessories have become so popular, prices have skyrocketed far above what anyone could have predicted just three to five years ago. A Chloé bag is £800, a Marc Jacobs is anywhere upwards of that. Back at Matches, you can find Balenciaga bags for up to £8,000. "We've actually sold quite a few of those to a mix of people. They are serious purchasers who want a collector's piece that isn't all that recognisable," says Tom Chapman.

"Our prices have been going up in recent years but they are reasonable for luxury products and prices are no longer what they used to be," says Galli. Perhaps more surprising than the hoiking-up of prices is that the only effect this has had on sales is to increase them. "It's not that price is irrelevant to customers, just that it is no longer the most important variable," he adds.

Prices have risen partly because manufacturers can get away with it - if there are customers who will spend anything on a bag, why sell it for £500 when you could get £800? - but also because accessories, bags in particular, have become so much more complicated. As anyone who has been inadvertently hit in the back of the head with the padlock dangling from a Chloé Paddington can tell you, superfluous hardware has become unexpectedly popular; ditto gold chain straps, oversized snaps and fastening and quilted leather - and all this has raised prices. But even those in the industry are shocked by how much women are prepared to pay: "I am surprised at how the prices have risen in the past five years. But women today seem to want so much more from their bags," says Stuart Vevers.

Another factor contributing to the accessories phenomenon is the success of the high street. Zara, Topshop et al may be adept at tricking out a Chloe-esque tunic dress but it is harder to copy a bag or shoes and it is on this front that designers have been fighting back. This is why most accessories are still made in Italy instead of China and developing-world countries, as fashion companies know that it is only on the quality front that they can keep aspirants at bay.

However, the high street is retaliating. In 2004, Topshop opened its first stand-alone shoe store in Manchester, reflecting the investment the company is now putting into accessories and, thanks to a similar financial focus on shoes and bags, New Look's shoes have garnered a similar reputation for high quality, despite the £20 price tag (one pair is sold every three seconds). But ironically, this has probably driven designers' prices up even more as they add yet more chains, buckles and expensive handiwork to distinguish their cashcows from the high-street versions.

More worryingly for designers, many of the bags are losing their aura of exclusivity and desirability. As customer demand has risen, so have the number of places you can buy the bags. Just a year or so ago, you had to get on a waiting list to buy a Chloé bag; now anyone with the desire and the funds could walk into a department store and buy one. Balenciaga was so horrified at having become associated with the footballers' wives and girlfriends due to their love of its Lariat bag that it changed the bag's name.

So is the designer accessories market reaching saturation point? An interesting indication of this was, in fact, revealed at the fashion shows. While nearly all the editors in the audience and the models on the catwalk swung around their identikit supersized bags, it was notable that some of the most influential figures in the business were bare-wristed. "I don't get [the It bag phenomenon], I find them clunky," says Cathy Horyn dismissively. Anna Wintour, editor of US Vogue, never carries a handbag to the shows, suggesting, as some have pointed out, that she has that even more desirable accessory - a chauffeured car - waiting outside in which she can leave all her important papers. With every Wag worth her oversized sunglasses carrying a designer handbag, and copies being sold on any street corner, it may well be the biggest statement bag a woman can carry is no bag at all.

-Guardian Unlimited UK