My Bag

I have two favorite bags. One is from Céline and I bought it for 400 euros in Hong Kong at a secret address. A fake. You can save up and give up your vacation, but I won't do that. Besides, I always get tired of a bag after six months, so now I’m just flaunting a Céline bag, but inside I’m secretly chuckling because it was so cheap. I do sometimes buy real bags, you know. Five years ago I bought a beige tote bag from Chanel on designervintage.com. All the ladies from the Cornelis Schuytstraat in Amsterdam who normally scour that site must have been on vacation because I was able to buy it for 350 euros.

Are you careful?

I have a talent for making an enormous mess of all my fifteen bags in a short time. The first week I’m still careful, but once there’s a first little stain or scratch on it, I don’t care so much anymore. It could very well be that I put a bag down in a puddle of rainwater. Then the bag lives like I live. So my Chanel bag doesn’t look great anymore either. So I thought I’d go to the Chanel store to ask to spruce up the bag a bit, but unfortunately, that would cost an awful lot of money and wouldn’t actually make it look any better. The dry cleaner didn’t dare to take it on either. I even thought about dyeing it, but I didn’t dare to do that either. Then I just got to work myself. In the washing machine with a bottle of baby shampoo. I just need to polish it a bit with some leather polish because it has become a bit stiff and faded, but after that, it can last a few more years.

What does your bag look like inside?

The contents are also a mess, so much junk that I drag along. There’s always a cork from a bottle of Chateau Petrus from 1956 that I drank on a very special day in my life. Such a bottle of wine is truly priceless. There are also a bunch of lipsticks lying around in my bag. From bright orange to gloss from Chanel, Lancôme, or Dior. I always have my passport and laptop with me. About once every three weeks I go on a trip and then I clean house and take out all the unnecessary junk.

Do you already have someone in mind who will inherit this bag one day?

I have another Chanel bag and I think I’ll give it to my daughter Fleur. But she has now also bought a Chanel 2.55 jumbo herself. Mom had to front the money, you know. Actually, I thought she should save for her own dream bag, but she came up with a good argument that those bags get more expensive every year (it does rise with 30%), so it would never work to gather that money in time. Fleur managed to entice me. We bought it together during couture week in Paris on a Monday morning at eleven o'clock. It was a lovely and special moment.