7/20/2011 - Gucci shoes outlet

A recent study revealed that the average handbag and its contents are worth a whopping nine hundred dollars! That is 120 billion dollars women are carrying around in handbags nationwide. And can you blame us, really, when there is such an abundance of variety in the handbag market?

It could well be argued that handbags have overtaken shoes as the luxury collectable accessory of choice for celebrities and ordinary women alike.

But in fact handbags may have had as long and controversial a history as the ubiquitous high heel, and according to handbag historians they were used in a similar way - to show the status of the wearer.

In the fourteenth century, the richer and more powerful the person was, the more jewels and embroidery festooned the handbag. Not much has changed in the handbag world, then.

Over the centuries handbags have gone through many adaptations and fashions, but the word handbag was only coined in the 1900s. The start of the twentieth century also heralded the type of handbag we would recognise today - with bags getting increasingly smaller and the introduction of handbag fasteners, inner compartments and locks.

But that is enough history: clearly the most important time period in terms of handbags was the fifties, which saw the rise of the ultimate handbag designer houses; including Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Hermes.

Like Chanels Number 5 perfume, some of these handbags have become instantly recognisable fashion icons; signifiers of the rich and the famous. Sadly, though, this means that showing off your new Louis Vuitton at the office party, or having a stash of Gucci handbags in the wardrobe, is out of the price range of almost everybody.

Gucci shoes outlet   coach sunglasses outlet