BagExchange.com

Finally, someone has decided to let some of us share in the wealth. So smart of Bag Borrow or Steal to implement a loaning program for collectible arm ware. Now, it is possible to carry museum worthy purses for that event you deem worthy for presentation. As BBS says, vintage is the new black. Here’s an excerpt from an article on its site–

Defining “Vintage”

Why is fashion luxury from the past so sought-after today? As Elizabeth Mason writes in Valuable Vintage, “The great thing about vintage is that it doesn’t get old, it just gets older…!” So just how old is vintage? The fashion industry defines the vintage era the last 100 years. Anything older than that—such as Victorian—is referred to as “antique.”

But vintage, in its purest sense, suggests a future. A good wine is proclaimed a “vintage” and is put away until it can be appreciated as such. The older a bottle becomes, the rarer it becomes, and therefore the more valuable. But the key is that it was predicted to be a good vintage at the wine’s inception. So it is with fashion and, of course, with handbags. Styles from the early 20th century, particularly those in good condition, are rarer than those from the 1990s and therefore tend to be more valuable. But each decade has its important designs that are destined to become classics. Chanel’s quilted bag, for example, was created in the 1950s and is still as hot as ever.

Some iconic contemporary designs are hoarded by savvy collectors who know instinctively that their value is destined to increase (see Moschino’s Dripping Chocolate bolide). As Caroline Rennolds Milbank points out in The Couture Accessory, when it comes to the luxury couture market today, “playing hard-to-get has increasingly become a valuable marketing tool—the mere fact that a piece is unavailable adds to its allure. The brand that leads this strategy is of course Hermès, whose Kelly and Birkin bags are most in-demand. Each bag takes at least six months to be made by hand therefore the company controls output to such an extent that bags made today will have a higher value tomorrow.

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