In the past few weeks, my colleagues have been amazed at the breadth of my purse collection. I show up to work carrying a purse they haven’t seen before nearly every day, and their response is always to ask, “how many purses do you even have?” These are people that have seen me constantly for a year: so what has changed?
It’s quite simple: I got a shelf.
You see, I’ve traditionally stored my purses in two or three tupperware containers stacked on top of each other in my closet, and that does not lend itself well to the early morning panic of choosing a purse to go with my outfit. So they sat in the containers in their dustbags for years, never seeing the light of day or receiving the warm flood of appreciative comments from my colleagues that they deserve. And really, when I pretty much wear jeans and a Star Trek t-shirt every day, the same denim hobo bag will probably do fine.
I was a huge fan of Clueless growing up in the 90’s, and the two pieces of technology that made the biggest impact on me were the mobile phones and Cher’s wardrobe software program: it let her mix and match outfits and even told her when something was a mismatch. I sort of took it for granted that when I grew up, we’d have advanced as a society to the point where both of these technologies would be commonplace. The mobile phones are here, of course, but unfortunately, that whole computerized wardrobe thing never caught on.
So while I now have a shelf to store my purses, I still find myself rifling through various dustbags to figure out what I actually have, and of course I have no artificial intelligence that would tell me when I’ve chosen a purse that doesn’t match my outfit (though I’d absolutely ignore any and all advice it gave me).
Is the answer as simple as labeling which purses are where? This wouldn’t help me, as I tend to put purses wherever there’s room and shuffle them into the wrong dustbags — you can imagine how my CD collections used to be organized. I’ve been thinking about putting pictures of every single one of my purses in one slideshow on my laptop or phone so I can scroll through them easily and choose which one I want for the day. It’s not as fancy as Cher’s system, and this still wouldn’t help me actually find the bags, but at least I’d know what I had.
I need help: how do you store your purses and make it easy to know what you have? And how do you find what you need quickly? I realize this is a very niche problem to have, but I need to ensure that I’m taking full advantage of the variety of my handbag collection. Cher Horowitz would understand.
