Archive for 24 January, 2010
Its in the (hand)bag
Great piece in today’s Sunday Times about the Unmade Beds (women who, for example have hairdryers but rarely get around to using them, yet still can scrub up pretty well when required; see Meryl Streep, Helen Mirren, Stella McCartney) versus the Pristine Pillows (high maintenance with fake nails, hair, boobs etc, a la Victoria Beckham, Cheryl Cole and Danni Minogue).
In her article, Shane Watson suggests that the best way to differentiate between the two tribes is to look at their handbags. Unmade Beds are lugging round enormous, overloaded handbags, last cleared out in 2007, but ready to cater for any eventuality. Pristine Pillows tend to keep their bags small and tidy – Debenhams says that the weight of the average handbag has halved in the last two years from 7lb 11 (3.5kg) to 3lb 5 (1.5kg) thanks to minimalist multitasking technology like iphones.
I think I fall somewhere between the two camps – I eat carbs and chocolate and spend most of my weekends covered in mud at the stables, but I’m also a big fan of pedicures and use products like volumising root spray on my hair. But since my handbag weighs in at nearly 6lbs, I must be leaning towards being an Unmade Bed.
It’s occurred to me that if a handbag is such a window to a woman’s personality, why aren’t we exploiting them as a research tool? There are lots of ‘contents of my bag’ sets on flickr, but obviously only confident and technically savvy women are going to be sharing there.
If we can use fridges and even wardrobes (I spent some very interesting afternoons doing Wardrobe Walk Throughs in respondent’s bedrooms as part of a project for a mail order brand a few years ago) as insight, then why can’t we persuade women to open up the final frontier and invite us into their handbags?
