Schrödinger's Birkin: Exhibiting the Liminal Handbag

Schrödinger’s Birkin:

Exhibiting the Liminal

Handbag

Catherine

Buckland

MA Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Heritage Studies:

Museum Studies, Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2019

Word count: 19,525

Mw. dr. Sophie Berrebi

Dhr. prof. dr. Bram

Kempers

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The Handbag is Liminal

Chapter One: Pockets and Secret Places

Chapter Two: ‘A Storm in a Handbag’: The Bags of Margaret

Thatcher

Chapter Three: Beautiful Practicality: Making the Designer

Conclusion: The Handbag is Liminal

Bibliography

Acknowledgements:

This Master's thesis was inspired by my time interning at the Amsterdam

Museum of Bags and Purses. I am a great believer in the idea that all topics can be worthy of serious academic attention, and Het Tassenmuseum Hendrikje taught me a great deal about how one small facet of the human experience can make for a world-class museum. This thesis is intended as an exploration of an object that seems to have been given little attention by academics and fashion historians alike. The handbag is an item often overlooked, both in the fashion and historical world, and I hope that this thesis goes some small way to righting this wrong.

This thesis would not have been written without an incredible amount of help, and I am very grateful to everyone who provided support and encouragement in this endeavour. I would like to especially thank Dr. Sophie Berrebi for her

support and enthusiasm for this topic from the very beginning of her

supervision of this thesis. I am also grateful to Dr. Bram Kempers for agreeing to be my second reader. I would also like to express my gratitude to my peer reviewer Carl Deußen for teaching me the subtle arts of both sourdough and the academic paragraph. I am indebted to my colleagues at the Tassenmuseum for their patience and constant willingness to provide assistance, and my fellow Museum Studies classmates for their endless capacity for inspiration.

This thesis is my own original research, and all work within these pages is entirely my own. That being said, I am indebted to the work of many theorists and authors with a far greater knowledge than I have, which is indicated in the text through the use of citations. Works that I read to aid in this thesis can be found in the Bibliography at the end of the text. I am also grateful to a number of sources whose aid cannot be directly cited: in particular the Armani/Silos press office and Andrew Riley from the Churchill Archives, both whom provided invaluable assistance in answering many questions.

This thesis is dedicated to Dr. John Richards, from whom I learned far more about the joys of academia than I’m sure he ever intended.

“There is of course the bag. (Looking at bag.) The bag. (Back front.) Could I

enumerate its contents? (Pause.) No. (Pause.) Could I, if some kind person were to come along and ask, What all have you got in that big black bag, Winnie? give an exhaustive answer? (Pause.) No. (Pause.) The depths in particular, who

knows what treasures? (Pause.) What comforts. (Turns to look at bag.) Yes, there is the bag. (Back front.) But something tells me, Do not overdo the bag,

Winnie, make use of it of course, let it help you...along, when stuck, by all means, but cast your mind forward, something tells me, cast your mind forward, Winnie, to the time when words must fail- (she closes eyes, pause,

opens eyes) and do not overdo the bag. (Pause. She turns to look at bag.)

-Perhaps just one quick dip.

Happy Days: a Play in Two Acts, Samuel Beckett (1961)

Introduction: The Handbag is Liminal

In Shakespeare’s Othello, the character of Iago spends much of his time advising the hapless Rodrigo to ‘put money in thy purse’ (Shakespeare, 1.3, 340-407). However much this scene may add to the audience’s early impression of the villainous Iago, the speech lacks much in the way of information for a

novice dress researcher. This is due to the fact that Iago never stops to say whether there would also be room in Rodrigo’s purse for, say, a pocket handkerchief.

This aggravating lack of detail nicely illustrates the struggle of the would-be handbag researcher. The ‘purse’ Iago is referring to here is specifically a small receptacle made of leather or other flexible material, used for carrying money on the person (‘purse’, OED), and not the more versatile modern usage that also incorporates the female-carried fashion bag. Regardless, it is an early example of the difficulties of understanding a bag as both a public and a private object. The purse is present: Iago mentions it seven times in that speech alone, making it an undeniable- albeit mute- third player in the scene. Iago supposes that Rodrigo has a purse in the same way that an audience member assumes their seatmate will have a purse: something in which to keep one’s coins is as much an inevitability in a modern person’s possession as it was five hundred years ago. It is in this way a matter of public fact, particularly in Shakespearean England, where purses were often worn visibly at the belt. However, the fact that we as an audience knows as little about the contents of Rodrigo’s purse as Iago, illustrates the other facet of the hand-held bag: the content of one’s purse or bag by default is entirely private to the owner. Shakespeare has, in the space of one short speech, demonstrated the whole difficulty of classifying the bag. At once both entirely public and entirely private, it is a textbook example of a liminal space. It is this liminality that will be the main focus for this thesis. I may not have studied Othello since high school, but an object that is at the same time both public and private poses significant questions in a museum display context.

The word ‘liminal’ comes via the Latin root limen, the word for

‘threshold’. It is, however, hardly a true Latin term: the phrase ‘liminal space’ was first coined in the early 20th-century by Arnold van Gennep, who probably never intended for it to be applied to anything quite as prosaic as the handbag. An ethnographer by trade, he focused instead on rites of passage from around the globe, and it was not until his work was picked up in the mid-1960s by

Victor Turner, a British ethnographer and anthropologist, that the term came into wider usage. Today, there are any number of texts that name everything from nightclubs to the Twilight book series as occupying the space first termed ‘liminal’ just over one hundred years ago. That being said, there has been little work linking this much-used term to dress history, specifically in terms of

handbags, and the presentation of dress accessories within a museum context. The handbag appears to me to be a demonstration of the liminal in a sense close to van Gennep’s original explanation of the term. He uses the phrase ‘neutral zone’ to refer to a physical space between two clearly defined places. The example van Gennep uses is the space where Spartan warriors would make sacrifices before going into battle, in the space no longer within the army’s camps, but also not within enemy territory. He describes it thus:

“The neutral zone shrinks progressively till it ceases to exist except as a simple stone, a beam, or a threshold. The portal which symbolises a taboo against entering becomes the postern of the ramparts, the gate in the walls of the city quarter, the door of the house. The quality of sacredness is not localised in the threshold only; it encompasses the lintels and architrave as well...The door is

the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and sacred worlds in the case of a temple. Therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world.”

(van Gennep, 1960: 19-20)

I would argue that the same principle of the neutral zone can be applied to handbags as to any great ruin of Grecian antiquity. The clasp of the handbag1

acts as van Gennep’s taboo-like portal; a place that, much like the gate in the walls of the city quarter, is not breached without difficulty, even if in this

context, the difficulty is more due to cultural defences than any Tegean guards. This ‘quality of sacredness’ is not reserved purely for the clasp of the bag; a

1This is an English word where I prefer the Dutch equivalent sluiting -from the verb sluiten (‘to close’)- which emphasises the closing action implicit in a handbag’s fittings.

lady’s handbag as a whole is an object of privacy and neutrality as much as any lintels or architrave of a city gate. The handbag to me therefore signifies the same boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds as the door does to van Gennep. A woman’s handbag is her own personal domestic sphere.

Whether the bag is full of children’s toys, a teacup Chihuahua, or a single $100 bill2 _{is ultimately irrelevant: whatever is within the bag is her own private}

property. Meanwhile, the bag itself is part of the foreign world which surrounds it. The bag is visible to the world in a way that the bag’s contents are not. Regardless of contents, a bag is an important (and very visible) accessory: women on the red carpet, for example, are criticised by the world’s media if their bag does not ‘go’ with their outfit regardless of its contents, meaning the bag’s appearance is a factor just as important in the bag’s overall perception as any private inner contents. To apply van Gennep’s method, the sluiting of a handbag is the true liminal space: it is the threshold through which one unites oneself with a new world. The bag becomes this space within van Gennep’s “quality of sacredness”, with its unseen contents representing a far greater domesticity than is implied by the outside appearance of the bag.

It has always been a struggle to decide how best to display dress objects in museums. Fashion exhibitions are proving to be big business in the twenty-first century, with the 2018 Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic

Imagination exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York the museum’s

most-visited exhibition to date. This comes with its own set of problems- not least that these exhibitions are inevitably reliant on big-brand sponsorship (Menkes, 2011: online) - but with dress exhibits today drawing ever-larger crowds, the question remains how best to display them. From the prosaic issues of mannequinage to problems of a more philosophical nature, dress objects are inherently difficult items to display, with their own unique set of issues. Dress is uniquely personal, and unlike any other kind of museum object. To quote

Quentin Bell, “Our clothes are too much of us for most of us to be entirely

2 Suggested as the only acceptable contents of a Swarovski-encrusted Judith Leiber minaudière by the designer herself.

indifferent to their condition; it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even the soul” (Bell, 1976: 19). Diana Vreeland, one-time Vogue editor-in-chief and Met curator, remains infamous for her dramatic displays of dress in the 1970s and 1980s, which were criticised on the grounds of “commercialism and historical inaccuracy” (Steele, 2015: 10). To use

Vreeland’s own riposte to such criticism, “The public isn’t interested in

accuracy- they want spectacle!” (Dwight 2002: 210). This question of spectacle versus historical exactitude remains present to this day, and nicely illustrates the liminality of dress objects in general: can a piece of clothing- in this thesis, specifically a handbag- ever be purely spectacle, or does it carry with it some inescapable piece of history? How, to return to Bell, can a museum curator ever hope to display something as intangible as a soul?

With this in mind, the central question of this thesis is whether it is possible to highlight this ‘sacred space’ in a museum context. All dress objects incorporate both the public and private worlds to a greater or lesser extent3_,

but I argue that the handbag remains unique. It is one of very few dress

accessories that retains an unseen prosaic function whilst still remaining fully public. A Gucci running shoe demonstrates both function and fashion without any element of mystery, whilst Spanx performs its duty without being visible to the public, but I would argue that it is the handbag alone that represents both a woman’s most public aspect- her choice of dress- whilst keeping her items entirely private. This poses a fascinating problem in a museum context as to how best to display such a piece. How does a museum decide whether to display a handbag as a functional object full of personal items or a public fashion item? In this thesis, I intend therefore to take the handbag as my

chosen focus to represent the issues of displaying dress more generally, whilst looking more closely at the specific issues posed by bags in a museum context. Taking the notion that the handbag is a liminal space as a starting-point, I intend to look closer at specific bags in specific collections to see how their

3 For example, the effects that can be achieved through the use of shapewear (a term encompassing everything from stays to Spanx) that, save for some unforeseen mishap, are invisible to the casual observer.

liminal qualities have been represented by museums and curators. Accessories often play second fiddle to the more visually exciting aspects of costume within dress collections, and in many cases are only used as set dressing, or to

contextualise a larger piece, as can be seen in the V&A’s permanent display of costume. This is not intended to be a criticism of such methods of display, but instead an exploration into what can be done when one takes a specific

accessory- in this case, the handbag- out of a supporting role.

This thesis will focus specifically on the female-carried fashion bag. This gender divide is partly due to space restrictions. The history of men’s bags is a long one, beginning in many ways with Ötzi the ice mummy, and, via ‘The One With Joey’s Bag’ episode of Friends4_{, ends at the present day with the rise of}

the so-called ‘metrosexual’ and his ‘man bag’. That being said, I would argue that the female-carried bag has always run on a separate course to that of its masculine equivalent. The fashion bag is an object that up to the present day remains exclusively the property of women, and as such, I intend to explore what the handbag means and represents when carried by women. Bags carried by the so-called ‘fairer sex’ have been unique objects of ridicule in a way that I have not encountered when reading about bags carried by men. This, of course, only applies until men decide to carry bags more traditionally seen on women, at which point- as demonstrated by Mr Tribbiani on Friends- men open

themselves up to equal amounts of derision for their apparent adoption of more feminine traits. To me, the handbag therefore represents a uniquely female space which I will explore separately to bags carried by men.

This inevitably comes with its own issues, summed up perhaps best by Susan Kaiser when she wrote that “fashion is more than a white, bourgeois, heterosexual female affair” (Kaiser, 2012: 34). Due to my primary focus being on the historical function of the female-carried fashion bag, I use the terms ‘female’ and ‘woman’ in this thesis in the cisgender sense of the words. This is intended to reflect the historically-expected carrier of fashion bags, as well as

4 Whilst not perhaps the episode that has dated the most poorly since it aired in 1999, it certainly represents how far society has come regarding gender norms.

the demographic towards which fashion bags have aimed to market themselves. This is also due to my use of historical sources that discuss women, where the terms ‘woman’ and ‘female’ were expected to be understood by contemporary readers in the cisgender sense of the term. This thesis will be focused on the history of cisgender women not out of a desire to exclude but, again, to cut the topic down to a manageable size.

There is also the question of class. The fashion bag has not, historically, been an accessory open to women of every class. Those with the means to afford fashion bags have been tied since the earliest days of the reticule to the upper echelons of society. It is perhaps no coincidence that bags that serve function first and fashion second are often the ones least tied to gender: laptop cases, shopping bags, and suitcases, to take but a few examples, are all offered in colours and designs not aimed at appealing to one specific gender5_{. Small,}

impractical bags remain to this day an implicit status symbol, as demonstrated by the continuing popularity of the clutch bag as evening-wear. Whilst they may come today in more inclusive price points, such a bag brings with it the implicit admission that your larger possessions- whether coat, car, or bed- are under the safe protection of someone else. This, as I intend to discuss through my

research, is not a recent phenomenon, and one I hope to explore further. This is therefore going to be a cisgender study of upper-class women and their

possessions throughout history with a strong focus on Western fashion history. The three case studies used to explore this topic are all handbags on display within different museums. They were chosen as representatives for the wider narrative of the female fashion bag and in an attempt to cover the history of the handbag from the hand-held reticule of the eighteenth-century up to today. The chapters therefore proceed in a chronological order, ending in the present day. The chosen bags also represent what I see as the three major types of handbag: the handbag as a personal object, the handbag as public object, and the handbag as fashion object. Of course, as I have already mentioned, I

5 Although, of course, there are many companies out there working hard to put back the gender divide, with any number of pink laptop cases, and so-called ‘man-bags for life’ (Warburton, 2015: online) offered to those who feel uncomfortable outside of the gender norm.

believe all handbags to occupy the liminal space between these terms, but the chosen case studies are intended as examples that illustrate one particular aspect much more strongly. To this end, I have chosen to start with the

Amsterdam Museum of Bags and Purses’ display of pockets and reticules, two handbags once owned by Margaret Thatcher, and end by comparing the

presentation choices at the Armani/Silos museum in Milan to the Gucci Garden experience in Florence. What I intend to show with my chosen examples is the unique difficulty posed by handbags when it comes to exhibiting them in

museum collections. By looking at these bags in their own unique settings, I intend to compare and contrast how different bags’ liminality has been presented in very different museum spaces.

Ultimately, I think there is much that has been left unsaid when it comes to the presentation of dress in museums. I would argue that this is doubly true when one focuses on accessories generally and handbags specifically. I am interested to discover how much of this can be attributed to sexism within the museum world: costume collections are still far too often dismissed as being only of female interest, and handbags, as I hope this thesis will demonstrate, have been dismissed for their primarily feminine owners since the time of the Empress Josephine in the early 19th century. The amount of discourse on the public/private dichotomy in museum spaces has increased vastly in the past few years, and I hope that this thesis can contribute to this discussion.

Chapter One: Pockets and Secret Places

“The contents of a...handbag form the most reliable time capsules, and definitely the most honest. Opening a 1930s Cartier bag that once belonged to a showgirl, the couture collector Mark Walsh found a bottle of scent, a booklet

of powdered leaves, and a pair of pink satin tap-dancing knickers (perfectly clean). The cleft between respectable exterior and intensely private interior is what gives the handbag such an erotic and transgressive charge. It is perhaps a

woman’s last secret place.”

Handbags: The Power of the Purse, Anna Johnson (2002)

The history of the female-carried fashion bag can be dated to the introduction of the Empire waistline. The so-called ‘Empire’ dress has “a waistline just below the bust, and a skirt that is long, loose, and straight” (OED: 2018). The ‘Empire’ in question refers to the Premier Empire- the period when France was under the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, and his wife, Josephine de Beauharnais, is often credited with spreading the trend around Europe. The looser, less

restrictive silhouette (it is notable in not requiring corsetry in order to achieve) was part of a wider shift in dress away from the heavy silks and brocades of the eighteenth-century, and therefore often linked with a desire to escape anything related to pre-Revolutionary France. This is an overly simplistic timeline that negates the growing taste for the neoclassical that was already coming into fashion pre-Revolution. Marie Antoinette was wearing “simple muslin dresses” by the early 1780s, as part of the trend where “all over Europe, costumes were becoming simplified...as if in response to some shared zeitgeist” (Fraser, 2001: 208). Regardless of the precise dating of its introduction, it is certainly the case that by the turn of the nineteenth-century, women’s fashions in much of Europe had changed for the simpler. With light, loose dresses, made from the newly-imported cottons and linens from newly-conquered colonies, the fashion was for pale colours that signified one’s high status as a woman unlikely to get her clothes dirty.

This new desire to appear neoclassical appears to have somewhat intoxicated the fashion-minded women of Europe. To quote:

“Not only did corsets and under-petticoats disappear, but further garments were also discarded...The more fashionable of these half-insane women strove as to which of them should put on the least clothing...In 1801 a lady in Hanover

laid a wager that she would walk through the streets dressed only in a chemise and a neckerchief without exciting any particular attention- and she won her

bet easily” (Fischel, 1909: 103-104).

Whether or not such events actually happened- Fischel was writing a hundred years after they purportedly took place- it reflects the zeitgeist of the period, and illustrates nicely the issue that would lead to the invention of the handbag.

In the spring of 2018, Het Tassenmuseum Hendrikje renovated their historic display of bags, and as an intern I assisted with the preparation of objects dating from the fifteenth- to the nineteenth century for display. The Tassenmuseum- the largest dedicated handbag museum in the world- has been

located in a historic house located within the Grachtengordel (canal belt) in the centre of Amsterdam since 2007. Dutch canal houses are by design tall and slim, which in the Tassenmuseum is used to designate a broadly chronological presentation of display. The upper-most floor is home to the oldest bags in the collection, with the floor below displaying bags from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The visitor is encouraged to begin with the top floor and work their way down to the basement, which is, somewhat inevitably, home to the gift shop. This means that the first room visitors are intended to experience is

chronologically the oldest. The room is dimly lit, and lined with spot-lit vitrines, which, together with the room’s original low ceiling, creates a sense of

theatricality.

The first vitrine in the room is a selection of highlights from the museum’s collection, which serves to introduce both the museum’s history and the

original collectors (Heinz and Hendrikje Ivo, from where the museum’s Dutch name originates). This first vitrine has bags which span the full timeline of the Ivo’s collection, from their very first piece- a nineteenth-century tortoiseshell handbag- to a briefcase owned by the present king of the Netherlands. The next display case is where the room’s overall narrative becomes clear, with a

selection of the earliest bags from the collection. However, the third vitrine in the room displays the museum’s collection of tied pockets. This is the important point to be drawn here: a museum that is eponymously dedicated to the display of both bags and purses6 _{has precisely one vitrine dedicated to bags before the}

narrative of the pocket becomes dominant. There is, of course, a perfectly sensible explanation for this: the museum’s focus is almost exclusively on the carried fashion bag. But in many ways the narrative of this female-carried fashion bag, as illustrated in this introductory room at the

Tassenmuseum, begins with the pocket.

The new fashion for the diaphanous at the turn of the nineteenth century posed a new issue for women in terms of how they could carry their belongings

6 An interesting distinction in the English title- “The Amsterdam Museum of Bags and Purses”- that, notably, is not highlighted in the Dutch title.

with them. Up until this point, both men and women had carried the vast majority of their belongings in their pockets. There are numerous mentions in Shakespeare, for example, of both genders concealing things in their pockets- sometimes unsuccessfully, as in the case of Beatrice in Much Ado About

Nothing, whose love letters are stolen out of her pocket by the well-meaning

Hero. There is difficulty in sometimes identifying pockets in images from the period; Rebecca Unsworth sums up my own frustrations nicely when she writes that “it can be difficult to determine what is simply a fold in the fabric, and what is a pocket hole” (2017: 151). Despite this, surviving texts clearly indicate that women were wearing pockets at all levels of society, from homemade

dimity pockets to Elizabeth I’s set made to match “a rounde kyrtell of yellowe taphata” in 1580 (cited by Unsworth, 2017: 156).

Whilst it is often unclear from contemporary sources as to how these pockets were incorporated into the garment, it is certainly true that by the seventeenth century, women were wearing sets of pockets that were

independent to their other garments. These pockets7 _{were worn tied at the}

waist, over the shift but underneath petticoat and overskirt, and accessed through slits at the hips. There are many surviving examples of such pockets in collections around the globe, and their size is often surprising. Pockets would usually reach to the knee- in the novel Clarissa, reference is made to Clarissa’s pockets being “half as deep as she is high” (Richardson, 1747: 569)- and there are various references to pockets having multiple levels, or inner compartments that suggests that such garments were capable of carrying a great deal. This is borne out if one reads court transcripts from the period. A range of

astonishingly sizeable stolen goods were found concealed within women’s

pockets in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, perhaps most notably in the case of Jane Griffiths, who, in 1777, “was accused by Thomas Wainwright of stealing two live ducks. She had tried to hide them in her pockets and escape across the fields” (cited by Burman and Denbo, 2006: 22-23). There are

7 Referred to variously as ‘tied pockets’, ‘thigh pockets’, and in the Duchess of Devonshire’s trousseau as ‘Pockits’ (July 1774)

certainly a great number of pockets detailed in ‘Lost and Found’ notices from the same period (cited by ‘A History of Pockets’, 2018: online) which points to both the amount of worth placed on them, and perhaps also the amount of weight placed in them, if they were so frequently lost. This also explains why they so suddenly dropped from the fashion plates of the time. Whilst a tied pocket fits admirably well underneath a wide skirt stiffened with multiple

petticoats or farthingale, a dress with an Empire waistline- particularly when it is made out of semi-sheer cotton or muslin- does not conceal a pocket in the slightest8_{. By 1809, the use of the tied pocket had passed so firmly out of the}

fashionable eye that when a character in Celia, a novel written the same year, asks “What is fashion?”, the answer comes promptly back: “Why, fashion is not to wear pockets” (Byron, 1809: 247). Women had gone from being able to carry on their person anything up to a brace of ducks to being expected to carry everything in their hands, and so it is hardly surprising that an early alternative name to the reticule was an ‘indispensable’.

With one swift shift in fashion, women had to rely on very visible assistance to keep their essentials quite literally to hand. The sudden

introduction of a handbag into a woman’s everyday requirements cannot have been easy. To anachronistically quote Nora Ephron, “ when one of your hands is stuck carrying your purse, it means it’s not free for all sorts of exciting things you could be using it for, like shoving your way through crowds, throwing your arms around loved ones, climbing the greasy pole to success, and waving madly for taxis” (2013: 540). Ariane Fennetaux has written at length on the

importance of the pocket to women in the eighteenth century as a private object. She argues convincingly that they were- to go back to the Johnson quote in the chapter heading- women’s ‘last secret place’. Women were often without (to use a phrase coined two hundred years later) a room of one’s own9_.

8 I understand, of course, that what is featured in fashion plates, and what was enacted by real women may of course have differed wildly- Barbara Burman writes at length on the use of the tied pocket well into the nineteenth- and early twentieth century. However, that being said, I am interested here in how fashion dictated to the fashionable woman, and how much the loss of the pocket would have affected those who wished to appear in style.

9 Something that is perhaps best demonstrated if one remembers that even Jane Austen wrote the vast majority of her works on a tiny writing table next to the front door of her brother’s house

Fennetaux gives various examples of women keeping pen and ink in their pockets so they could write private letters whenever they found themselves alone, and many women slept with their pockets under their pillows to ensure their privacy was not violated at night. The pockets, due to their discrete nature from the rest of the garment, did not require emptying before removal. A

woman could therefore use her pocket as an entirely private object- unseen throughout the day due to its hidden nature by design, and unseen at night due to its presence under the pillow.

Secret places are often closely linked with eroticism. The handbag links into this idea due to its liminal nature; a bag is implicitly enticing due to the fact that it is both a public and a private object that allows enticing glimpses of the contents. To reuse the header quote, bags often carry an “erotic and

transgressive charge”. Fennetaux argues that, due to its hidden nature, the female pocket was therefore also a source of sexualisation. She refers to

several images, penned by British satirists at the end of the eighteenth century, which she argues illustrates “the widespread association of pockets with

women’s genitals” (2008: 319). I take issue with this because I find many of Fennetaux’s statements unfounded. She confidently asserts, for example, that pockets had a “strong link with sexuality” due to their shape being “evocative of female sexuality” (ibid). This is a statement she does not provide any

compelling evidence to support- her visual analysis of a Rowlandson aquatint, for example, uses as its case study an item of clothing I would argue is a decorative bow or belt that she misidentifies as a pocket to justify her claim10_.

That being said, however, the idea that pockets or bags were sexualised due to their liminality is not without basis. To use a somewhat infamous example from

(Tomalin, 2008).

10 In one of the images used by Fennetaux to illustrate her point, the gaze of the man she refers to as ‘libidinous’, to me at least, does not appear to be fixed on a pocket, but instead firmly onto her posterior. Furthermore, what Fennetaux identifies as a pocket appears to me to be more of a decorative bow- not to mention the fact that it is very clearly being worn over the skirt, calling its identification as a pocket somewhat into question. There is also the question of the date of the image; the Rowlandson aquatint dates from the early 1790s, a period where, as already

discussed, thin muslins were coming into fashion. With the title of the aquatint being “A Sudden Squall in Hyde Park” the gentleman in question may well instead be inspecting more closely the somewhat transparent effect white fabric gains when it is caught in the rain.

two hundred years later, Sigmund Freud drew a direct link between a woman’s purse and her genitalia in his 1905 treatise on ‘Dora’. A patient of his, she one day:

“wore at her waist...a small reticule of a shape which had just come into fashion; and, as she lay on the sofa and talked, she kept playing with it...Dora’s

reticule, which came apart at the top in the usual way, was nothing but a representation of the genitals, and her playing with it, her opening it and putting her finger in it, was an entirely unembarrassed and yet unmistakable pantomimic announcement of what she would like to do with them- namely, to

masturbate” (Freud, 1905: 76).

Whilst Freud’s ideas have been widely criticised11_{, his choice of a reticule}

is indicative. ‘Dora’, as a fashionable upper-class woman of the early 20th century, would have been wearing many more layers of clothing than a modern woman, yet it is the reticule upon which Freud chose to focus (and not, for argument’s sake, her shoe). The choice made by Freud to focus specifically on Dora’s bag shows how much it represented her hidden interiority. For a

psychoanalyst with such an intense interest in his patients’ internal ways of thinking as Freud, that the reticule was the object he selected indicates to what extent a bag’s liminality is an intrinsic part of its overall narrative. Whilst I may not agree that the pocket was an explicitly yonic object in the eighteenth

century, Fennetaux’s wider point stands. She does not use the liminal argument in her writing, but I would argue that it is the greatest indicator for

sexualisation.

There are a number of contemporary sources that instruct young women to never open their reticules in front of company- particularly male company- and this, I would argue, is due to the privacy inherent to the pocket or reticule. Dora’s reticule is a bag into which one can only catch glimpses, which in turn-

11Perhaps most memorably as “wrong in most cases, objectionable in many, and superfluous in all” (Jones, 1963: 383)

and Freud is by no means alone here- can be hypersexualised. This is

particularly the case, I would argue, with the female-carried fashion bag, and is indicative of the wider issues with femininity and the male gaze. To borrow a line from Emily Ridge, “women’s bags... [are] evocative of a female interiority to be newly explored” (2017: 68). Ridge focuses specifically on the women of the turn of the twentieth century, but I would argue that the early reticules from a century beforehand represent this idea equally well. What I find an interesting idea is how the bag’s inherent privacy represents a woman’s

interiority. Whilst this is true of all bags, pockets pose a particularly fascinating case study due to their stages of becoming liminal. The pocket had been an entirely private object of clothing since it was first12 _{worn, but with the}

introduction of the reticule, this entirely private object all at once became public, making this a rare example of a handbag in the process of becoming liminal. Regardless of whether men found these changes sexually appealing, what is fascinating is the rarity of such a shift- from interiority to exteriority, or, to use the phraseology of this thesis, from private to public.

This is why I would argue that the displaying of pockets- particularly within a handbag museum- poses such a challenge in a museum context. Pockets are not commonly displayed within museums (‘Pockets of History’, 2006), and this is hardly due to any scarcity: pockets were worn by women from every level in society for over two hundred years, and this is reflected in the number that survives into the present day. However, they are essentially a hidden object, meaning that either one has to display them out of context or on a mannequin in collaboration with other garments. On a mannequin, of course, either the display presents a dressed woman, and the pockets are at most glimpsed, or one chooses to display the undergarments alone, which in turn provides a somewhat distorted narrative to a visitor. The Nordiska Museet in Sweden presented an exhibition of historic dress with a video of an actor putting on the many layers required for different historic outfits, which meant

12 Unsworth argues convincingly that pockets, both integrated and tied, were worn from the late fifteenth century, although bags containing valuable objects had undoubtedly been concealed within a woman’s skirts for far longer.

that a visitor could observe exactly how each item of clothing interacted with each other13_{. This, unfortunately, is a method only possible when one presents}

dress objects in motion, and, short of employing someone to patiently dress and undress themselves for visitors, means that this can only be experienced though video, and not with the objects to hand. In the Tassenmuseum, the choice was made instead to present their pockets as isolated objects. This is partly due to practical reasons- the vitrines in the upper floor are not tall enough to stand a mannequin up in, but it also presents an interesting narrative for the pocket. As the forerunner for the reticule, to hang pockets in direct conversation with reticules forces the visitor to draw a dialogue between the two. Both the

pockets and the reticules are suspended from the top of the vitrines, which is in direct opposition to the presentation of older bags, where they mostly stand on small plinths. This, again, is largely for practical reasons: the fifteenth-century bags are both heavy and fragile, whilst both pockets and reticules, due to their comparative lightness, lend themselves well to being hung. However, this also forces the visitor to draw a firm distinction between what has come before, and what follows in the history of the female-carried fashion bag.

13 Somewhat frustratingly, although one of the outfits features an underskirt with slits that appear to be intended to facilitate pocket use, no pockets are featured in the video

By displaying the pocket in a manner that takes it out of its contextually-understood position, it helps draw a wider narrative surrounding the history of the pocket. In the decision to display their pockets in the same way as their handbags, the Tassenmuseum thus projects onto them a liminality that the modern visitor will understand. In their choice of display, the pockets are no longer ‘secret places’, but items with a strong visual link to the modern handbag. This does not, of course, compromise their liminality- modern bags are as liminal as their predecessors- but it does change the way they are perceived in a modern museum setting. This in many ways mirrors the

historical change from the pocket to the reticule discussed above. In the same way that the pocket moved from the private to the public during the reign of Napoleon, the display at the Tassenmuseum takes the pocket- a part of the history of the handbag not widely known- and displays it as a public reticule,

The chronological display of pockets and reticules at the Tassenmuseum. Amsterdam, 17th December (2018).

which, if nothing else, is better-known due to its visible status as a fashion accessory. The pocket here- as is the case with all museum objects taken out of context- is no longer a woman’s ‘last secret place’. By dint of their presentation, no handbag in the Tassenmuseum is truly private. The rendering of all objects as fully public, to return once more to the header quote, removes all trace of the handbag’s ‘erotic and transgressive charge’. Whilst there is some merit in the idea that a visitor becomes in some ways a voyeur upon visiting a museum, the fact that the objects on display no longer represents a woman’s ‘last secret place’ means that any sense of voyeurism that a visitor does experience is false. The once-private objects have become fully public, meaning that all erotic tension that once surrounded the objects has been removed.

Chapter Two: ‘A Storm in a Handbag’: The Bags of Lady

Thatcher

“This is a storm in a handbag. This is ridicule and reticule. We haven’t got any handbags, and as far as I know, we are not going to get any handbags. We are

in the business of conserving documents.”

Unnamed archivist of the Churchill Archive, upon being offered a bag belonging to Margaret Thatcher.

The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice,

Ludmilla Jordanova (2012)

Politician Julian Critchley was once quoted that “Margaret Thatcher and her handbag is the same as Winston Churchill and his cigar” (Elan, 2016: online). To say nothing of the contrastingly gendered symbolism of these two objects, this is an equivocation Thatcher would have undoubtedly enjoyed. It is also accurate; regardless of the years since her tenure as Britain’s first female Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher’s handbag is still as recognisably a symbol of who she was as any cigar of Churchill’s. Whilst handbags sometimes

represent a woman’s most secret place, in this chapter I intend to look at the handbag as a shield, and as public representative. As a case study I can therefore think of no better representative of this idea than the infamous handbag carrier, Margaret Thatcher herself. Thatcher’s iconic carrying of a handbag “violently wrenched the bag from its traditional associations… When the handbag is turned to offensive purposes, it inverts the sense of nurturing and swelling abundance that ordinarily dwells in bags” (Connor, 2011: online). In his piece, Connor links the female-carried bag with what he refers to as

“mumsy nurturing qualities” (ibid), but regardless of whether a handbag can ever truly be considered maternal, he is right to draw attention to the fact that Margaret Thatcher’s use of a handbag was ground-breaking. The bag in

question is undeniably liminal; during her time in office, her colleagues lived in fear of what she might produce at any moment from within her handbag. To quote the former Education Secretary Kenneth Baker, “When Maggie was really up against it, she would put her handbag on the cabinet table and take out a well-crumpled paper...It was unpredictable, sometimes illuminating...Many are the ministers who have cursed the contents of that wretched blue handbag” (Stone-Lee, 2013: online). In this chapter, I wish to explore the idea of the handbag as a public object, and what effect it creates when a female-carried fashion bag is used as part of a woman’s public persona. The bag’s liminality, as the quote from Baker shows, is still implicit, but here I intend to explore how Thatcher exploited its public side, and how, in turn, museums can represent this in their choice of display.

Politically-minded women were carrying handbags long before Margaret Thatcher. Dorothy bags were the terror of Britain at the turn of the twentieth century after they became the weapon of choice for the suffragette movement. A popular style of bag that was gathered at the top by a drawstring, and slung by loops from the wrist (‘Dorothy bag’, OED: 2018), it became synonymous with the more militant side of the fight for women’s rights. During a protest in

London, protestors were each “issued with a striped denim Dorothy bag

containing stones...The bags were attached round the waist under the skirt, and at the signal for the ‘smash up’, the stones could be reached through a placket pocket” (cited by Meeres, 2009: 50). In one case in Bradford, they were used as the sole proof of suffragette activity after a reservoir was dyed purple. Despite the fact that “no literature or suffragette symbols were left behind”, the fact that the dye had been thrown into the water in a “Dorothy handbag”, which was found floating on the surface, was taken as proof enough that the newspaper heading felt confident in titling the event as a “Suffragette Outrage” (cited by Keighley, 2007: 108). There has been little exploration of the importance of the

Dorothy bag in the wider body of literature surrounding the suffragette and suffragist movements, but I would argue that the link between bag and dangerous woman is important. The bags became, in a manner similar to Thatcher, representative of a dangerous form of femininity. Bags that were originally made to be no more than fashionable accessories to an outfit (albeit a vital one, given their introduction shortly after the loss of the pocket) were reclaimed as weapons in a fight for universal suffrage. Their inherent liminality was exploited; the bags’ feminine, non-threatening exteriors were exploited to allow for a militarised interior. Whether containing stones or dye, the liminal Dorothy bag did not appear from the outside to be an explicit threat, a shielding effect that the suffragettes could exploit to their greatest advantage.

Women have used items of clothing to shield themselves since time immemorial. In a memorable passage from John Dos Passos’ 1925 novel

Manhattan Transfer, the character Ellen (who by this point in the story has

married a rich man she no longer loves) feels safe at a glamorous party due to her clothing:

“Ellen sits in the armchair drowsily listening, coolness of powder on her face and arms, fatness of rouge on her lips, her body just bathed fresh as a violet under the silk dress, under the silk underclothes; she sits dreamily, drowsily listening. A sudden twinge of men's voices knotting about her. She sits up cold

white out of reach like a lighthouse. Men's hands crawl like bugs on the unbreakable glass. Men's looks blunder and flutter against it helpless as moths”

(1925: 182).

Passos uses the clothing Ellen wears as a representative shield, and she is protected from male attention through her clothing, her underwear, and

cosmetics. Here, a well-dressed woman is as untouchable as a moth under glass due to her choice of clothing. In this particular example, it is the trappings of wealth- the excess of silk and the ‘fat’ rouge creating a very specific aura- that make Ellen so remote, but this is hardly the only way women have used dress

objects to shield themselves throughout history. For women in power, I would argue that this has often been used with intentionality. An earlier example of a female politician using the traditionally understood trappings of femininity as a shield is Queen Elizabeth I of England. Her public persona was far more about inspiring her subjects than it was about letting them see her as human. From her portraits, where little humanity is discernible under the heavy makeup and elaborately symbolic costumes, to her famous speech disregarding her weak and feeble female body in favour of her king-like heart and stomach (Marcus, 2002: 325), Elizabeth I is an early example of a female political figure using clothing as representative of the image she wished to project.

I would argue that with her handbag, Margaret Thatcher provided a similar level of shielding. A handbag is, after all, a quintessentially feminine item, and Thatcher’s use of it undeniably called attention to her gender. She was, to use Jordanova’s phrasing, “a woman intensely aware of herself as such” (2012: xxi), and as such, I think it must be assumed that her use of a handbag was a calculated statement to draw attention to her femininity. It is perhaps notable that of the female politicians that have followed her into the higher echelons of power- in recent years those such as Hillary Clinton and Theresa May- handbags have not become a part of their signature style in quite the way Thatcher claimed them. Indeed, in the case of May14_{, there is at least one}

example caught on camera of her abandoning her handbag before a photo call in Malta in 2017 (Gillett, 2017: online). It is perhaps indicative of the long, handbag-shaped shadow Margaret Thatcher cast over British politics that Britain’s second female prime minister is so unwilling to be photographed with one. Its legacy is perhaps best felt in the existence of the verb ‘to handbag’. Despite the Oxford English Dictionary citing its first usage as early as 1952, the term came to the fore during Thatcher’s time in office. Defined as “to subject to a forthright verbal assault or strident criticism; to bully or coerce in this

way...esp. of a woman” (OED: 2018), it is a peculiarly sexist term that was used as recently as 2008. This term highlights just how much the handbag was part

of Thatcher’s public persona. That the term was used before Thatcher’s premiership is ultimately irrelevant; the term is now forever linked with

Thatcher15_{, due both to her aggressive political tactics and, of course, the bag.}

When the term is employed by journalists today, it is due to a desire to link a female politician (or occasionally a male politician they seek to emasculate) with this particular style of leadership. The term is always used in the

pejorative sense, and thus the use of the word “handbag” is considered insulting due to its intrinsically feminine nature.

Margaret Thatcher was a woman who used her gender as an essential part of her ‘brand’. Wendy Webster covers this at length in her book The

Marketing of a Prime Minister, where she argues convincingly that Thatcher,

both before and during her time as prime minister, successfully used her

gender as a key part of her politics. According to Webster, she publicly became the ‘best of both worlds’: “both the glamorous female star, a familiar, benign and acceptable image of female success, and also the hard masculine warrior and leader- an Iron Lady clothed in soft female flesh” (1990: 73). Webster does not mention Thatcher’s handbag in her book16_{, which to me highlights the need}

for greater academic attention on the topic of the handbag, but I would argue that it is a key part of both sides of Thatcher- both glamorous female and Iron Lady.

The handbag as a key female signifier was something which was

capitalised upon by both Thatcher and her fiercest opponents. Her “exceptional coalition of femininity and power that she manifested” (Jordanova, 2012: xxi) is, I think, best summed up through her fashion choices. The full history of

Thatcher’s sartorial choices as she moved through the ranks of the British Conservative Party have been documented elsewhere (e.g. Webster, 1990), but Thatcher’s commitment to traditional representations of femininity in her clothing is especially noteworthy. For example, she very rarely was

15 A recent example is the 2013 Buffini play Handbagging, which relies solely on the association of the verb with Thatcher to make its topic clear. The play is notable for having two Margaret Thatchers onstage simultaneously.

16 Although Webster does devote much more time detailing Thatcher’s early use of hats to successfully signify her shift within the class system.

photographed wearing trousers. This is in stark contrast to more recent female politicians, such as Hillary Clinton, who first made the trouser-suit a key part of her wardrobe in the early 1990s. To quote Clinton herself, she thought “it would be good to do what male politicians do and wear more or less the same thing every day” (Clinton: 2017: 129), liking the idea that she was “different from the men, but also familiar” (ibid). This goes against everything Thatcher portrayed herself as during her time in politics. Thatcher instead often took umbrage if interviewers employed one of their favourite descriptions of her as being ‘the best man in the Cabinet’ in her hearing (Webster, 1990). During a speech she once introduced herself in terms that were at the same time both strongly feminine and masculine in character:

“I stand before you tonight in my Red Star chiffon evening gown, my face softly made up; my fair hair gently waved…the Iron Lady of the Western

World!” (Thatcher, 1976).

By embracing the term ‘Iron Lady’17 _{and putting it in direct contrast with her}

‘chiffon evening gown’ and ‘gently waved’ hair, she was embracing both aspects of her personality at the same time- strong politician and feminine ideal. At once both an indication of strength and undeniable femininity, “Iron Lady” is perhaps the most accurate description of Thatcher ever coined. To borrow a phrase from Beatrix Campbell, “Feminity is what she wears, masculinity is what she admires” (Campbell, 1987: 125).

Into this blend of gender norms comes Thatcher’s handbag, which I would argue is an ideal case study for her technique of using a feminine identity as a shield for her masculine intentions18_{. She used to keep her speeches in her}

handbags which were printed on paper cut specifically to fit within the bag (Wild, 2012). This is a neat encapsulation of Thatcher as a political figure: by

17 One of her most famous monikers, which at the time of the speech in question, had been coined only a few days earlier by a Soviet newspaper (OED:2018)

18 Thatcher famously had no interest in supporting other women for the sake of their shared gender- she once remarked that the battle for women’s rights had “largely been won”, and in her eleven years as Prime Minister, appointed just one woman to her cabinet.

keeping the speeches- which had been up until this point the preserve of men- in such an explicitly feminine object, she was drawing attention to both how she was different to her male predecessors and how she was an improvement. The fact that the handbag does not get a single mention in Webster’s book, which was published the same year she lost power, may suggest- beyond the need for a greater number of handbag academics- that perhaps the handbag has been somewhat inflated in public memory since Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister. Regardless, the power it still holds means that it can be seen as one of the major objects that represents her time in office.

To quote Susan Pearce, “An object only has meaning in relation to, or in juxtaposition with, other objects. Objects are, therefore, socially meaningful” (1995: 14). I would argue that this is particularly true in the case of Thatcher. Ultimately, her choice of bags- Launer, Asprey, and the occasional Judith Leiber clutch - was hardly remarkable from a fashion point of view, making the owner of the bag the more important part of the narrative. To use Pearce’s

terminology, it is the ‘juxtaposition’ with Thatcher herself that provides her bags with ‘meaning’ or worth- whether that is financial or otherwise. Whilst brand new Launer bags are offered for sale on their website for just under £2000 today, a Launer bag belonging to Thatcher went for £15,000 at auction (Christies: 2015), showing the very real financial power an owner can hold over an object. To return to the idea of liminality, this makes the public aspect the most important one when it comes to the handbags of Margaret Thatcher. To quote Sophie Woodward, “Clothing...remains a ghostly presence, coming to appear immaterial by the very lack of engagement with the physicality of clothing” (Woodward, 2005: 21); here, I would argue, the bag itself fades very much into the background of the narrative when faced with the ‘ghostly

presence’ of Thatcher herself. The fact of Thatcher’s ‘engagement’ with her bags is what stops the handbags now on display in museum collections from becoming ‘ghostly presences’ themselves; the fact that Thatcher interacted with the bags (even before one takes into consideration how much they formed

a part of her political identity) is what forces the handbags to remain ‘material’ due to their continued ‘engagement’ with the Thatcher narrative.

That being said, in a museum context, all that is left is the bag itself. Thatcher may herself be a ‘ghostly presence’, but when faced with her bag in a glass vitrine, the bag has to stand in as representative for all aspects of her presence, both public and private. This is therefore a fascinating object to present in a museum context. I intend to explore more deeply two very different presentations: at the Tassenmuseum in Amsterdam, and the other in the

Churchill Archives in Cambridge. The question is how museums can represent such a public personality through their presentation of their objects. The

Tassenmuseum, to the best of my knowledge, is the only museum in the world to have a handbag of Margaret Thatcher’s, and is certainly the only museum to have one of her bags on permanent display. The Churchill Archives, by

comparison, keeps its own Thatcher bag stored safely out of sight in a box in its archives. Again, to the best of my knowledge, it has never been loaned to any exhibitions or been displayed in its own right within the archives. Instead, it is only available to view via prior arrangement with the head archivist. This dearth of Thatcher bags in the public eye may be less a testament to her somewhat uncomfortable place in today’s political climate, and more an indictment to how few handbags are ever considered noteworthy enough for museum display, but regardless, it certainly makes all displays worthy of analysis.

Bought shortly after her death in 2016, the Tassenmuseum’s bag has been on display ever since in the permanent collection of bags from the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. What is particularly interesting about its positioning within the room is that, whilst many of the vitrines are ordered by theme

(including a case showcasing suitcases from the past century), the Thatcher bag is part of the display of designer bags. This vitrine, which takes up the length of one wall, showcases some of the biggest names of the last century in handbag design, including Chanel, Alexander McQueen, and Vivienne

collection- a Swarovski-encrusted Judith Leiber minaudière in the shape of the Clinton’s cat Socks, which was carried by Hillary Clinton at her husband’s second Inauguration ball19_{. It can therefore be understood to be part of the}

museum’s narrative of designer handbags.

This in itself is an intriguing prospect. The plain grey bag is not even the most attention-grabbing work by Asprey in the room20_{, meaning that it can}

therefore be concluded that the bulk of the attraction in the object lies with its erstwhile owner. This is why it is so interesting that it is placed in a display showcasing some of the most famous names in the fashion industry. By making the choice to display it as such, the museum equivocates the name of Chanel or Balenciaga with that of Thatcher. Of course, in a museum setting, objects are always required to take the place of their erstwhile owners in order to tell a narrative, but it is rare that a museum equivocates the story of the Chanel 2.55 with that of a politician, and rarer still that they are displayed as equals. On a

19 It has been a Leiber tradition to provide a bag for the First Lady for this ball since Mamie Eisenhower brought one to her husband’s inauguration in 1953.

20 For comparison, the permanent display also showcases a solid silver minaudière by Asprey from the 1930s, complete with jewelled cigarette lighter and powder compartment.

cynical level, the ‘designer’ case is there for those seeking familiar names; not every visitor can be expected to be well-versed in the minaudières of the 1920s (also documented in free-standing vitrines in the same room), but the big

names in the fashion industry are something the vast majority of visitors can recognise and find familiar. In the Tassenmuseum’s display technique, Thatcher and her bag are reduced to a familiar name, of equal importance to Balenciaga or Vivienne Westwood. There is, of course, any number of prosaic justifications for this method of display: in a small museum like the Tassenmuseum, where space is at a premium, it hardly makes sense to dedicate an entire vitrine to a collection of political handbags numbering precisely two. That being said, one cannot only look at curatorial intention, but also at how the choice of display is understood by a visitor. To display a bag of Thatcher’s alongside a last-season Balenciaga Bazar21 _{is to equivocate the two, whether intentionally or not. This is}

in much the same way as displaying a pocket in the same way as a handbag forces a viewer to understand it as such, but here, the understanding is that all big names of the twentieth-century should be understood in the same way. This, I would argue, is problematic for a number of reasons. ‘Pure fashion’ bags, as I will discuss in the next chapter, have their own set of issues when it comes to display, but political bags- in this case the bags of Margaret Thatcher- have a very different set of needs. As I hope this chapter has shown thus far, what Thatcher’s bags represented, both to her and to her public perception, was in many ways unique, and therefore to display the bag as just one more famous name is to reduce the ways in which an audience can understand it. As one can tell from the photograph above, the museum clearly feels this disconnect- an A4 label to the right of the bag, written in both Dutch and English, provides a level of interpretation for the Thatcher bag far greater than is provided for any of the objects surrounding it. This, I would argue, calls attention to the limitation in this method of display, and one that the museum clearly seeks to rectify.

21 The Balenciaga 'Bazar Shopper' first debuted in their A/W 2016 collection. As part of Demna Gvasalia’s first collection as Balenciaga’s creative director, it proved incredibly popular. Its iconic striped pattern drew comparison by the fashion press to traditional Thai shopping bags, often known as ‘Sampeng bags’ after the Bangkok market.

This choice of presentation stands in stark contrast to the Thatcher bag in the Churchill Archives, which are situated within Churchill College, Cambridge. Housing a collection of several million documents related to British politics from the past hundred years, the archive is also in possession of a bag of

Margaret Thatcher’s, which was acquired in 2002 (Riley, 2018). This is perhaps despite the quote included in the header, which is the surprisingly vitriolic response of the curator of the archive upon first being offered the bag soon after Thatcher’s departure from office. In retrospect, this response- and particularly the anger behind it- seems surprising, given the importance of Thatcher’s bags, but they were hardly alone in holding this opinion. Shortly after Thatcher’s death in 2016, the V&A made headlines for declining a selection of Thatcher’s clothing- a decision they later reversed, but not after some public pressure (Elan, 2016). Despite the Churchill Archive curator’s misgivings (Jordanova does not provide specific authorship), the bag was eventually passed into the Churchill collection, where it remains one of the archive’s most popular attractions. It is not on public display, unlike at the Tassenmuseum, but according to Andrew Riley, senior archivist for the collection, it is taken out and viewed “every other day” by a visitor (2018: personal communication). This is perhaps the key difference in visitor experience between the two respective Thatcher bags; whilst one is behind glass, and can be seen by anyone who cares to pay the entrance fee, the other can be directly accessed, but only with an archivist present, and with at least a day’s notice to the archive. This distinction is particularly important to me due to something that Jordanova says in a YouTube interview discussing the

Churchill Thatcher bag, which she made to promote her piece on the object. She describes how, upon her first visit to the archives, she was instructed very firmly that she was not permitted to touch the bag but- as she puts it in the interview- she was allowed to smell it. There was still the trace of Thatcher’s perfume upon the bag, which remains discernible today, even after multiple changes of protective boxes. This perhaps illustrates best the difference

encourages a far more personal interaction with the ‘ghostly presence’ of Thatcher than the Tassenmuseum, because the experience is much more intimate. The passive viewing of a bag behind glass is very much a

depersonalising experience22_{- whereas Jordanova, whilst not being able to touch}

the bag, was still permitted to scent the Lady Thatcher.

The Churchill Archive’s bag is also notable due to the presentation of its contents. These objects were a later addition to the presentation of the bag, along with a note from Thatcher herself reminiscing on her time spent with the bag. This note, which was not part of the original presentation, reads, in its entirety:

“This is the handbag that I was given by friends in 1984, and which I used every day during my time at Downing Street. It always brings back many happy

memories. Margaret Thatcher” (cited by Jordanova, 2012: 3:49).

A full analysis of this note would, I suspect, reveal a great deal about Thatcher’s character. The references to both that the bag was a gift, and the emphasis on the fact that the bag was used ‘every day’ suggests that Thatcher wished, on some level, to justify her carrying a bag with an expensive price tag. It may- to borrow a line of reasoning from Webster, who makes a similar point in regards to Thatcher’s use of hats- be a case of Margaret Thatcher turning a designer bag into part of her much-touted narrative of ‘grocer’s daughter made good’. Thatcher may now carry expensive handbags, but that does not mean they represent her spending extravagantly on herself, and therefore that she has not lost touch with her lower-income upbringing23_{. This note can be taken as part of}

the creation of this ‘self-made’ narrative of Thatcher’s, and therefore may be

22 As countless visitors to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa’s bullet-proof ‘tomb’ can attest

23 Thatcher was somewhat fanatical about appearing to be a- to use her own words- a “prudent housewife” (Thatcher, 1974). An infamous occasion was when she defended herself against accusations she was telling the people of Britain to hoard food. To quote in full: “You look at the vast amount spent on cigarettes, the vast amount spent on Bingo, the enormous queues outside all the wine and spirit shops... All I am saying is, I think it's better than spending money that way .. to buy an extra tin of something when you're in the grocer's shop and quietly put it aside.” (ibid).

viewed with a certain level of cynicism. As Jordanova herself notes, Thatcher is known to have owned and used many handbags, both before entering Downing Street and during it, and certainly the number auctioned after her death

suggests strongly that the Churchill bag is not the only bag she used during her premiership. However, regardless of the precise details surrounding how often the bag was used by Thatcher, this note adds an extra layer of detail to the bag absent in the Tassenmuseum’s presentation. There is more of a personal link between the giver and the receiver of the bag- the Tassenmuseum’s bag was acquired at auction after Thatcher’s death, whilst the Churchill bag’s note clearly shows that Thatcher was aware, and to a greater or lesser extent approved of its positioning. By writing a note to accompany the display of her bag, Thatcher explicitly tied herself to this specific bag in this specific

collection. By referring to it- whether rightly or wrongly- as the ‘only’ bag she used during her premiership, she again draws the link between her bag and her politics. This provides the viewer with a far more tangible link with the figure the bag represents- a handwritten note acknowledging the existence of use and ownership is a further piece of provenance that encourages the viewer- if only on a subliminal level- to form a greater connection to the object.

This idea of connection is taken even further in the Churchill choice of presentation, where the link between the public and private bag is

demonstrated quite explicitly. In a lower drawer of the archival storage box which houses the bag is a selection of objects. The items were donated a few years after the bag came into the collection, and are intended to be

representative of the “sorts of items Mrs Thatcher might have carried while Prime Minister” (Riley, 2018: personal communication). This selection of objects is almost aggressive in their banality- a few items of cosmetics, a handkerchief, and what Jordanova describes as “a lovely and I suspect very expensive pen” (2012: 7:03) - and yet their importance is not to be underestimated. Jordanova phrases it best when she says:

“when we’re looking at this handkerchief, it’s not really a handkerchief itself, it’s who it was owned by, how it fits into a life, how that life fitted into a nation, and how that nation fitted into world politics through this particular individual. It’s about understanding the texture of lives, and how lives are lived

in, through, and with objects” (2012: 7:20-7:57).

It is this idea of the ‘texture’ of a life of a public figure, and how best to

represent that, which is the difficulty faced by any museum in the possession of an object required to represent something as wide-reaching and multi-faceted as a human being.

Ultimately, I don’t think that either presentation of a Thatcher handbag quite captures this liminality to its best extent. The traditional presentation of the Tassenmuseum isolates the viewer from truly connecting the bag with its erstwhile owner by putting Thatcher up as just another trophy in a list of famous names, thus denying the private function of the bag and its liminality. Meanwhile the collection of trivialities (as I’m sure Thatcher would be only too willing to term them) that accompany the Churchill bag further de-emphasises the importance of her political role- something that seems particularly odd given that the archive’s focus is, after all, on that aspect of her life. Whilst being able to smell her perfume and glimpse her handkerchief all serve to humanise the larger-than-life figure that was Margaret Thatcher, by doing this, it reduces her to her private life, whilst, of course, her handbag was as much part of the public world as her own personal speech-carrier. Perhaps if either museum chose to exhibit the bag with one of her custom-fit speeches, to better emphasise how important the handbag was to her public life, then perhaps this liminality could be better explored. All women carry pens and handkerchiefs in their handbags, after all; the importance of Margaret Thatcher’s- and perhaps even the justification for having such a bag on display in the first place- is how she differed from this. To reduce her to this- to just ‘another woman’- is as unhelpful to a wider narrative as it is to equivocate her to other ‘famous names’ of the twentieth century. Whilst, of course, she is both these things, the