Byline: GILLIAN BOWDITCH

When did the humble handbag metamorphose from respectable receptacle to replica breitling an object of cult status? My guess is when the bags started to become more famous than the icons who inspired them. There is a generation of young women lusting after an Alexander McQueen Novak with only the vaguest notion of the Hitchcockian heroine to whom it pays homage. We know everything there is to know about the Birkin bag but can anyone name a single film of Jane Birkin's?

The transformation of the bag from the most boring item in the wardrobe to the Kate Moss of accessories - exciting, expensive and excessive - is the great fashion mystery of the last 30 years. It is only a generation ago that a well-heeled woman would be happy with two bags for everyday use; one black, one navy; one patent, one leather; both rigid-framed and clicking shut with a satisfying snap. They were necessary but faintly ridiculous appendages and their style gurus were the Queen and Margaret Thatcher.

These trusty cart-horses of the closet - the bags, Chanel Jewellery not the leaders - would be replaced every decade, their predecessors pensioned off to the dressing-up box, where finding a stray pan drop or a half crown in their powder-scented, watered-silk interiors was one of the universal thrills of childhood.

The handbag has become a barometer of 21st-century consumerism. Even the most suburban of wardrobes now boasts a dozen or more. Once the rite of passage for a 20-something woman was a man spending two months' salary on a diamond. In a post-Bridget Jones world, where more and more women are destined to remain single, the emblem of independence and adulthood is blowing a month's salary (or more) on a Chloe Paddington or a Mulberry Roxanne. The most tragic of fashion victims rent the latest designer bag by the month.

But the bag has an elusive virtue in the world fashion - it is egalitarian. Wardrobe options become increasingly restricted as we age. Arms, thighs and midriffs are
embroidered patches exposed less and less until only our partners and our gynaecologists are even aware we possess them. The joy of a really good bag (and there are some great value ones around. Check out Jasper Conran's leather bags at Designers for Debenhams) is as a strong at 70 as it is at 17. Nobody every looked fat, frumpy or inappropriately dressed because of their bag.

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