The always awesome Greg Lindsay included Handbaggery in a piece of smaller journos at Fashion Week.
The piece is behind Mediabistro's Avant Guild firewall, but here's the bit about Handbaggery.
Thanks, Greg!
The Rookie Blogger
Pauline Millard's journey down the luxury handbag rabbit hole began last summer when she shanghaied her boyfriend at the time into buying her a Louis Vuitton Speedy for her 30th birthday. (He didn't quite understand the outlay involved when he made that promise.) Her research into which bag was best for her led to test drives from Bag Borrow or Steal, Internet research, and a heightened sense of bags as socio-economic status signifiers. That led Millard, a former staff writer for the Associated Press (but who had never covered fashion) to start blogging about handbags and the luxury-industrial complex in January.
Shortly thereafter, she resolved to cover Fashion Week both as a form of self-promotion ("If I left a stack of flyers and even three people picked one up, that would three more people who knew about it.") and as grist for the blogging mill. So she Googled "New York Fashion Week," and filled in a form on the site along with her credit card number. At first, they refused her $90. "They wrote me back to say 'We're sorry, we can't offer you credentials, but if you contact individual designers, maybe they'll send you tickets for their show,'" she says. "I was really bummed." But two days later the powers-that-be reconsidered, and she was in.
Millard's experience since then is testament to the power of simply being on the list. With official recognition as a member of the press/blogger comes invitations. Lot of them, apparently. "I've been invited to a lot of smaller shows in the 'Salon,' so I'm going to all of those," she says. "I also just received an invite from an actual handbag designer who wants me to visit her showroom. I'm going to try some of the big designers, but obviously everyone want to go to Marc Jacobs. The bigger hurdle was getting inside the tents."
With that hurdle cleared, her goal is to see "if I can network a little bit and meet people I probably otherwise wouldn't," adding "I just want to raise awareness of Handbaggery's existence, and maybe explain to people that it's not just handbag porn."
