incidentally

[metaphortunate]

Posted without comment:

By the time Diana Vreeland joined Harper's Bazaar in 1937 as a junior editor, handbags had become an integral and important part of the fashion business, as she would quickly learn. Shortly after she arrived at the august glossy, Vreeland had what she described in her memoir, D.V., as a "brainwave!"

"We're going to eliminate all handbags," she told a colleague.

"You're going to what?" he responded.

"Eliminate all handbags," she repeated. "Now look. What have I got here? I've got cigarettes, I've got my lipstick, I've got my comb, I've got my powder, I've got my rouge, I've got my money. But what do I want with a bloody old handbag that one leaves in taxis and so on? It should all go into pockets. Real pockets, like a man has, for goodness sake."

Then Vreeland explained how she wanted to devote an entire issue of the venerable fashion magazine to "showing what you can do with pockets and how the silhouette is improved and so on."

Her colleague ran from her office - "the way you run for the police!" she recalled - straight to Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow.

"Diana's going crazy!" he cried. "Get hold of her."

Snow went to see Vreeland.

"Listen, Diana," Snow told Vreeland, "I think you've lost your mind. Do you realize that our income from handbag advertising is God knows how many millions a year?!"

- Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Luster, by Dana Thomas

"Thanks. It has pockets!" - every girl ever responding to a compliment on a skirt/dress that has pockets

- Tumblr/Twitter, attribution unknown

Comments

[wordweaverlynn]

I love pocketses. And my backpack and fanny pack. And even toting things in my bra. And pokershaman's solution, which is a leather vest with many pockets. Purses are a freaking pain in the back and one of the reasons so many middle-aged women have a frozen shoulder.

[metaphortunate]

I dislike toting things in the bra! Alas, sometimes you gotta. But boob sweat. :(