The real secret to having 140-plus purses is to spend as little as possible on each one. I never pay more than $25 and I often find beautiful bags in excellent condition for less than $10. I buy most of them on ebay, occasionally on etsy, and I figure it’s a small enough amount that if I end up with something awful, or seriously damaged, I haven’t lost much. Besides, you can hardly buy anything in a store that you’d be willing to carry for $25 so I come out ahead no matter what.

I always say I collect two kinds of purses, but it’s really more like five. The first is Bienen-Davis, made roughly from the 1930s to the ’60s and known for their beautiful hardware. This one, with a cherub clasp, is typical:And so is this one, with the bar handle:
Although a few shoulder bags show up in the ’60s, these are real lady purses, the kind you hold by the handle or slip over your wrist:In fact, that’s one of the reasons I started using them: I was tired of having something hanging off my shoulder all the time. And yes, I use many of the purses I collect. Some are too precious or impractical, but I love collecting things that are beautiful, interesting and useful all at the same time.

I also collect Delill box purses, which were popular in the 1960s and are shaped like little steamer trunks:
They’re covered with faux leather, fabric, raffia, plastic–even cork!–and come in a zillion colors and patterns. Delill produced a wide variety of styles (see below for my inability to resist some of the other ones) and I like these not only for their novelty, but because they’re hard-sided, just like a real trunk, and hold a huge amount of stuff: I can put everything that fits in a Bienen-Davis bag AND most of my lunch in one.

I have a few mini-collections of other Delill styles: clutches, sometimes in the same pattern as a box purse:
And sometimes not:
Then there are the dozen or so fruit-themed change purses. Delill made many styles of change purses, along with eyeglass cases and even belts, but I love the fruit:
I also have a group of brown Delill bags with various kinds of beading that’s almost become an official collection. Several are satin clutches but here’s the latest, in velvet, which I bought just last week:
Yup, can’t stop buying them, and that’s how I know I’m a real collector.

Next: The collection I started after I promised myself I’d never start another one.

I’ve never been one of those people who collect things in a serious way. I’ve accumulated some cobalt glass and a couple of dozen vintage plastic bracelets, but that’s nothing compared to real collectors. I’ve got friends with substantial collections of particular kinds of books or jewelry, pencils, vintage photos, marbles, cameras and radios—even, in some cases, so many different things that they’ve basically got a collection of collections.

I didn’t grow up in a collecting family, unless having a zillion books counts. After I left home my mother started collecting decorative birds—little clay or ceramic ones, bird paperweights, bird whistles—along with alphabet books and stuff printed by William Morris. And she and my father collected art. But as much as I love to accumulate things like clothes, I was never interested in doing it in a systematic fashion. Until I started buying vintage purses.

It started when I realized that I could find nicer purses on ebay than I could in stores, or at least more affordable nice ones. I began with a couple of vintage alligator bags, not in very good shape but kind of fun to have. I looked casually around the web to see what else was out there and found a vintage purse in an interesting shape, covered with taupe fabric:
and I bought a couple of beaded bags because they were pretty. Then I remembered that I had my maternal grandmother’s mesh evening bag:
And then I went to Paris on vacation and bought a really beautiful beaded bag that I knew I’d never actually use:
I started browsing ebay more seriously, finding particular styles and brands I liked, and the next thing I knew, I needed a display cabinet:
The last time I counted, I had more than 140 purses.

Next: What do you do with 140 purses (besides putting them in a display case)?

An FB post from a couple of weeks back:

Pinkish brown linen Cynthia pants with black trim, brown silk shirt, brown socks, eggplant Trippen maryjanes, red/brown hand-dyed silk Cynthia scarf.

This year, people who read my Facebook posts see lists like this every day. I don’t usually include the links or mention the brand or designer of every item, but if you took notes you’d be able to figure out another part of the Match or Clash formula: that “high-low” thing style mavens, models and actresses in their 20s are always getting credit for inventing.

Of course, I invented the high-low mash-up long before those maven-model-actresses were born. Me and 1000s of other people who don’t dress in head-to-toe Single Designer but can sometimes afford to splurge. Like nearly everyone, I’ve always had to juggle style and money—or rather, overpriced “fashion” and my actual budget—and my favorite combination has always been expensive shoes with cheap tank tops. After all, a tank top’s basically a tank top but you can spot the difference between cheap shoes and expensive ones a mile away.

Right now my typical outfit is something by Chicago designer Cynthia Ashby or from the Swedish Gudrun Sjodren catalog, with a J Crew t-shirt or a cheap Uniqlo top as needed, plus these great gladiator sandals I ordered from Trippen as a birthday present for myself a couple of years ago. There are a million variations—a Uniqlo dress with an artist-made scarf, a pricey dress with an ancient cardigan—but the principle’s the same. It may look to some people like I don’t understand that those shoes are way too fancy for that t-shirt, but that’s kind of the point.

In the ’70s and ’80s, when I taught literature and women’s studies to undergraduates, I used to practice what I called “dressing to confuse.” Instead of the fairly consistent self-presentation the academic world generally expects, or the androgynous/hippie outfits lots of other feminist teachers favored, I’d wear a dress and girly shoes one day and jeans and a t-shirt the next.  If you’ve ever had students fill out evaluations, and especially if you’re a woman, you know that how you look is a point of fascination to them (“Why does she wear black all the time?”), so some of this was a deliberate attempt to undermine whatever conclusions they thought they could draw from my appearance.

But it also suits my temperament, which is why I still do it. Today, though, I’d probably call it something more like “dressing to show you I don’t care what you think.”