Well Trompe My Oeil: Bags To Make You Look Twice

The minute I saw this season's "Shadow" Birkin from Hermès, I thought, that one makes sense. Because as surreal as its embossed horizontal locking straps may be, they seem far less fiddly than the traditional arrangement of leaving the real, "working" ones open to dangle.

This bag got me wondering. Was it the first true example of the trompe-l'oeil bag genre?

The answer: Nope, not at all. There is a longstanding tradition of design houses issuing handbags under faux pretenses.

Some nice vintage examples:

This YSL tote


A lovely Roberta di Camerino velvet number (she made these a trademark)

A more recent Marc Jacobs example of a cleverly stitched clutch.

So who knows what creativity lurks in the minds of luxe bag designers? Not only the Shadow knows.

(top photo from Harpersbazaar.com, by Toby McFarlan Pond)

Fly Girl: The Aviatrix's Cap High Fashion Again

Jean Paul Gaultier, designing for Hermès, has seen the style potential of the aviator's cap, and used it as a recurring theme in his Autumn/Winter '09/10 line.

The question: was his inspiration helped along by the fact that Hillary Swank will be portraying Amelia Earhart in a forthcoming film? The wardrobe for the movie promises to be amazing, and it will be interesting to see how closely Hermès comes to replicating the leather-and-pearls élan of this incredibly stylish adventuress.

To give an idea, here's an photo of the lady herself, in a custom-made white leather flying cap.

If you'd like to get an early jump on the look, leather flyer's caps are available on eBay -- but this may be a little too authentic for anything but a costume party.

An more interesting and highly wearable option might be a hat like this one, a vintage wool cloche inspired by the idea of taking to the sky but more realistically stopping short at penthouse level.



(Hermès collection photographs from the Telegraph Online, by AP/EPA/Reuters)