Thursday, March 1, 2007
Andrea Potter has just returned home from her job with an apartment management company. Happy to be done with a long, trying day at work, the Branson, Mo., junior walks through the door of Rieger Scholarship Hall swinging her bright pink handbag. In her purse is a small collection of the things she relies on each day, from the necessary (reading glasses) to the not so necessary (glittery lip gloss).
breakbox
Hannah Miller’s bag
Who: Hannah Miller, Grove, Okla., sophomore
Bag: Basic black leather
Where she carries it: On errands to Target and out to dinner with friends
What she likes about it: It’s easy to carry and the shoulder straps don’t get stuck on her coats
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Andrea Potter’s bag
Who: Andrea Potter, Branson, Mo., sophomore
Bag: Bubblegum pink Dooney and Burke
Where she carries it: Anywhere but class
Contains: Reading glasses, loose change, perfume, wallet
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Kelli Haug’s bag
Who: Kelli Haug, Salina junior Bag: Tan basic everyday shoulder bag
Contains: Green wallet, sunglasses, mints
Most interesting item: Nintendo Power mints (in the shape of an old-school Nintendo controller)
Potter likes her bag because it holds everything she needs, but every once in awhile she can’t resist looking at what other people are carrying.
“There’s a whole lot of different styles out there and they really show off a person’s style,” Potter says.
Thanks to the rise of a new media and technology subculture, Potter is free to indulge her voyeuristic desire to take a look at, and inside, other people’s handbags. Currently there are a number of Web sites that allow for the posting and dissecting of users’ handbags and the contents that fill them.
A special thread on Flickr.com, the photo sharing Web site, is dedicated entirely to over 2,000 photos posted by users of the personal items they carry in their bags each day. Other sites, like InsideMyBag.com, allow users to email photos of their bags to be posted and shared with viewers around the world.
To this global audience, privacy is off limits. Users post pictures of anything and everything they have inside their bags, from watercolor sets and laptops to sunglasses and iPods, for all to see. The items show off a wide spectrum of the lives they represent and, for some, are becoming a valid form of artistic expression.
Saralyn Reece Hardy, director of the Spencer Museum of Art, recognizes the appeal these sites have because of their tendency to expose the art of utility in everyday life. Hardy thinks a cultural desire for individually defining aspects of life fuels the growth of this idea.
“There are small, personal items that mean things only for the person carrying them,” Reece Hardy says. “The personal items that are sometimes concealed can be as beautiful and satisfying as public objects, too.”
The handbags and the items leave small, archival imprints about what the carrier is doing or where they are going on a certain day, says Sherry Williams, curator of the Kansas Collection at the Spencer Research Library.
“I suppose in a way people’s papers document what they do,” Williams says. “The contents of your purse on any given day could define what you do or who you are.”
Whether the handbags and their contents have any deeper meaning doesn’t matter much for Potter. For now, she’s just interested in looking.
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