It did not, I have to say, take long for my sympathy for the woman who had her designer handbag stolen from a changing room in Oxford Street to evaporate into thin air. And that was when I read the headline to the story: “The moment an influencer had her £10,000 handbag stolen while shopping for designer clothes”.
That little word, “influencer” – the human equivalent of Bitcoin, having no intrinsic merit or interest but merely the value assigned by the many-headed – would have caused that well of human sympathy to dry up all by itself. But the words “£10,000 handbag” crowned it. Friends, there is no handbag on earth worth about a quarter of the median wage. Nothing sums up more the vulgarity of the culture than the fact that it’s now de rigueur for a young woman to flaunt £10,000 worth of designer handbag as a measure of success. As an artefact, the Hermes JPG Shoulder Birkin, in red is an attractive piece; it’s well made and an intelligent take on the original designed for Jane Birkin. But it is not worth the best part of my annual rent.
