Fashion sometimes excludes people on grounds that are truly nasty and toxic and which reflect and drive fundamental problems in our culture: race, weight, wealth. So I hesitate to bring up what I’m about to say because it is small-fry compared with those issues. What I want to talk about today is not, in the scheme of things, any kind of hard luck story. But I am going to bring it up anyway.
The microaggression for which I would like to call out fashion, today, is for all the times it has made me feel excluded because my handbag is inelegantly big and heavy. I have quite often felt like a no-hope outcast from glamour, on the grounds that the outfits fashion celebrates on catwalks or billboards or red carpets feature a handbag no bigger than a hardback novel, while the bag I carry to the office and back every day is closer in scale to a laundry basket.
