Designer bags as status symbols — Shopping for Happiness

I confess, I purchased a definitely expensive, actually gorgeous purse, the sort of handbag I by no means considered I’d personal, the essence of a Shopping for Pleasure invest in, and I did not compose about it.

At to start with I did not create due to the fact I was far more psyched about the other factor I’d bought the very same day – my pinstriped jumpsuit of delight. And I also did not publish mainly because I’d actually jumped the gun on the adhering to month’s expending allotment – which is to say, I put in two months Browsing for Contentment money in Just one Evening. (Who or what have I come to be?!)  

I was really freaked out about this and I coped by selecting I would not use the purse until eventually the following month, when I could legitimately have purchased it underneath my software. (I did not wait to purchase it in the first put mainly because it was 50% off and the only a person of its type. Yet again, there is certainly a lot to unpack in that get-in-now sale mentality but this is not that story.) 

When I expended my budget early, I nervous that I would re-commit the revenue the subsequent thirty day period —  but I did not. Self-discipline + guilt go a extended way. So, in this article it is: my Giorgio Armani bag.

It is modest, open up at the major, and really hard-sided – the opposite of the frankly sloppy oversized shoulder baggage my mother ordinarily carried. These baggage were being stuffed with every thing – receipts, earrings, unfastened charges, lipstick, examining eyeglasses, medicine, mail, pens, tons and a lot of tissues.

I skip my mom’s bags! I seriously preferred to continue to keep the last one when I was cleaning out her residence but I was trying to keep so significantly and it experienced icky clinical papers, and many others. in it… so I didn’t. (Pause for quick weeping session. And…we’re back.)  

This purse will will need several years of use before it has as significantly temperament as my mother’s shoulder baggage. I can’t consider my own little ones looking through significantly into it at this level as I’m nonetheless awfully “cherished” about what I set in it. It’s gorgeous and precisely to my style, but ideal now, I continue to sense a small self-mindful and conspicuously aspirational when I have it. It is virtually as if…

…I purchased a designer handbag as a position symbol.  

Me? Never! (Ha! Make that a further substantial horse I’ve fallen off this yr.) Can any individual relate?

And doesn’t it just take you again in time to recall your mother’s purses? 

For a relocating write-up on the evocative character of a mother’s purse, verify out this New York Times article by Mara Wilson, “My Mother’s Past Receipt.”  Many thanks for reading!