Today, women’s handbags come in all shapes and sizes. However it has not always been that way. Right up until the 1930s, handbags were barely used by most women in their day-to-day life.
Many women owned them, but only use them once a week to go to church or to go out visiting friends and relatives. As a consequence, the design of handbags was pretty narrow. Strangely enough, it was the war that accelerated the evolution of the modern handbag.
The Evolution of Womens Handbags
During the war, many women had jobs that took them outside the home on a daily basis. This meant that they needed a simple bag to hold their personal belongings and purse. By the 1940s, many women were wearing makeup on a daily basis, something which they had previously not habitually done. This meant that they needed some way of transporting their makeup and a few other belongings around. This generated far more demand for handbags and led to many luggage providers designing and making bags to meet the modern woman’s needs.
The other way in which the war influenced the design of handbags was that it changed the materials used to make them. Prior to the war, virtually all handbags are made from leather. It was a readily available material, but because of the war, it soon began to run out. As a result, women started to make their own handbags and began to use other materials, which were not rationed to do so. For example, raffia or recycled wool.
After the war, many women continued to need to use a handbag on a daily basis. Because they had become used to handbags made out of other materials, they were quite happy to continue to buy modern designs of handbags made from new materials. Without a doubt, the war enabled design of women’s handbags to leap forward and provided us with the foundations for the modern bags we see today.
Nowadays, women’s handbags are made out of a huge array of materials and come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Even today, they are evolving but not at the rate, they did during the war years.
Visit the Little Black Dress website to browse their range of womens handbags . They sell beautiful bags designed to be used with party dresses, cocktail dresses and evening gowns.