There are lots of ways to mark when you become a collector rather than someone who just has a big pile of stuff. I’ve got boxes and boxes of scarves and shawls, for instance: long and short ones, silk, cotton, linen, rayon, solid and patterned, artist made and mass produced, ones I bought online and on vacation, new and old and even really old (from my maternal grandfather, who died in 1929). But I don’t collect scarves or shawls. I just like them and can’t seem to stop buying more, no matter how often I tell myself I shouldn’t, and there’s no particular reason I buy one and not another beyond liking it better.

Collecting, though, is deliberate. You become a collector when you define the limits of what you’re accumulating and start looking for it on purpose: I’ll have this but not that and I won’t let chance determine whether I find it.

Lots of collectors are completists, trying to amass every single version of whatever it is they’re amassing, but I’m not. I have no idea how many styles of purses were produced by the companies I collect and I really don’t want to know. Or rather, I don’t need to know because I already know enough: There are lots of them out there, enough to keep me busy for a long time, and probably a lot more than I could ever use, display, or store.

I often say that one of the great things about collecting vintage purses is that it keeps me from buying new purses. The downside, of course, is that I can’t buy new purses. What I can do, though, is start new mini-collections, like the Delill fruit change purses. For a long time I limited myself to things like that—extensions of my existing collections. Then one day I ran across something that struck my fancy in a completely different way. Soon I started buying these:

These are all Margaret Smith bags—”Margaret Smith Gardiner Maine,” as the labels always say. Starting in the 1940s, Margaret Smith produced purses and beach bags, along with clothes we’d start calling preppy a few decades later. The bags are almost always fabric, usually cotton, and often lack the cardboard liners that make purses stiff, so they’re a lot floppier than leather bags. And because they’re fabric, the handles tend to get dirty, where leather ones tend to crack. But the fabrics are what attracted me in the first place and what makes me buy one rather than another:

Sometimes pretty is enough.