Bag charms are trending, from Dua Lipa to Emily in Paris, just like Jane Birkin back in the day
- Hermès, Loewe, Miu Miu and Burberry are aping the influencer trend by adding eclectic charms and chains to bags, an off-key approach to personalising your purse
Emily Cooper, the ultimate “American girl in Paris” may well have nearly lost her company’s most important client over her jaunty Eiffel Tower bag charm in Netflix hit Emily in Paris, but she always understood the importance of this particular accessory. In fact, she was ahead of the trend.
In a subsequent speech to said client – the imperious designer Pierre Cadault, who had declared Cooper to be ringarde (basic) – Cooper illustrated the importance of the bag charm in the fashion food chain.
“You’re right,” Cooper tells the designer. “I am a basic bitch with a bag charm. In fact, do you wanna know why I got that bag charm? Because my friends and I were obsessed with Gossip Girl. We all wanted to be Serena van der Woodsen in her gorgeous, crazy-expensive couture. But the only thing we could afford from any of those designers was a clip-on charm from an outlet mall in Winnetka [in Illinois].”
“So … yeah,” Cooper says. “I guess that made us pretty ringarde. You think ringardes don’t respect designers. We worship designers so much that we spend all we’ve saved on a dumb accessory just to feel like we’re somehow on your runway. You may mock us but the truth is … you need us. Without basic bitches like me, you wouldn’t be fashionable,” Emily says.
Bag charms have always been an accessible entry point to luxury. Indeed they’re said to have existed since ancient Egypt, where trinkets were attached to bags as protection from bad spirits, and in mediaeval times they were a sign of status. But they’ve never been more in fashion than they are now.
Blame the cost of living – where a little luxury has great appeal as opposed to shelling out for a whole new bag – but the late Jane Birkin, eternal style icon, may actually be the reason.
Photos of her battered, over-stuffed Birkin bag (famously named in her honour) have been doing the rounds on social media in recent months as the ultimate inspiration for kooky, lived-in and personalised luxury.
As Birkin once told an interviewer for CBS Sunday Morning, “I just thought it was more fun to hang things off it, the baubles and bangles and beads, when you just walk around, they jingle and jangle, so it’s a happy sound”.