I was super excited to learn that this month’s issue of Elle magazine featured an article about the Coach archives. “The Handbag Hunter” is one of the few articles in Elle that I’ve ever finished (I usually buy it for the pictures; I really don’t care about the articles about what creative directors are currently creatively doing.)
I love Coach. I lost count of how many Coach bags I purchased and did not register between 2006 and 2007. This was my second of three obsessions with particular purse designers. Smashed in between my Dooney & Bourke obsession (2005-2006) and my Juicy Couture obsession (2008-present), Coach is near and dear to my heart and to my budget. Currently in my purse, I have a Coach wallet, sunglasses, eyeglasses, and eyeglass case. I have learned long ago that a classic looking Coach never goes out of style.
But apparently the people at Coach have not always known this. They have not always had an archive and I’m not shocked by this. In recent years, their Classics collection has become popular to the point in which they are now reissuing older designs. A collecting archive is obviously necessary for this company. But the problem I discovered in this article is that no one cares about the provenance. While a Coach archivist can obviously be trained to spot a real and fake Coach bag, a normal archive would not allow an archivist to simply purchase pieces at a flea market without knowing a little bit about the object’s history.
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