August 28, 2014 |
You will find, as a woman, that almost everything you are blessed with by nature comes in twos: legs, arms, breasts and ovaries. Womanhood and pairs just seem to go hand in hand for some strange reason. You could say the same of men, but we have more, and anyway, who wants balls? Even the best women come in pairs. Shakespeare’s Sister, Shampoo, Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson. And now, from Prada, comes the double bag. Sandra Bernhard once did a monologue on Heart, well women in music, but she mentioned how she had been leaving the gym and saw a woman wearing an Ann Wilson tour T-shirt. On the front, a full-size image of Wilson, on the back a close-up illustration of her eye obscured with a peacock feather. Imagine, though, if the T-shirt hadn’t been an Ann Wilson tour T-shirt but a Prada double-bag T-shirt. It’s a double bag, so by its very nature, it lends itself perfectly to T-shirt design. One half on the front, full size, the rectangular body printed just below the breasts so they don’t obscure the rectangular shape of the bag, or give the bag a full-to-overflowing appearance. Expensive bags are never actually used for carrying things; their sole purpose is to make you look rich and expensive. The bag’s body wraps itself around your body, showing off to marvellous effect the suppleness of the leather. The arc of the handle is placed just so in order to hide the nipples, which to be honest, as this is a T-shirt, you wouldn’t see anyway. But I like to think that, this being Prada, the T-shirt would maybe be a little perverse, so is possibly sheer. Which is better for showing off the rainbow-like hues and the contrasting bright red lining. A gauzy layer with skin showing through makes primary colours ping somehow. Anyway, the front of the T-shirt would give you a full frontal of the bag. And then the T-shirt wearer would turn and you would be hit with the close-up, minus the peacock feather. Whereas a peacock feather may have enhanced Ann Wilson’s eye, in the case of Prada’s Double it would detract from the details. Personally I like the idea of a close-up of the little triangle logo, metal and topped with the same leather from which the bag is made, the glint of the gold Prada lettering captured via camera flash. It really does let people know that this is Prada. That you are a Prada woman and not some pale imitation. You could even have a touch of bag handle to show off the immaculate stitching that keeps the handles firmly attached to its body. Because bags really are all about the handle being attached to the body. Without them, it’s just a giant clutch. And you don’t do clutches, you only do bags. By Prada. Because, to paraphrase Bernhard, before Prada, there was no bag. They created the bag. They made it, they fucked it, they snorted it, they lived it. And after they did all that, they bestowed on womankind, the Double.
By Natalie Dembinska
