A woman’s mind is as complex as the contents of her handbag; even when you get to the bottom of it, there is ALWAYS something at the bottom to surprise you!
- William “Billy” Connolly Jr., Scottish comedian, musician, presenter and actor
She had the loaded handbag of someone who camps out and seldom goes home, or who imagines life must be full of emergencies. - Mavis Gallant, Canadian writer There are three known museums in the world that showcase handbags. One is the Simone Handbag Museum, a purse-shaped building in Seoul, South Korea. Another - the Tassen Museum Hendrikje, or Museum of Bags and Purses - is in a historic canal house in Amsterdam.
And then there’s the recently opened Esse Purse Museum, situated in Little Rock’s thriving South Main Street area.
It’s in a post-World War II-era building remade into a sleek, white structure, banded with black on its bottom, sporting glassblock windows and a silhouetted arm and hand appearing to clutch the red, purse-shaped museum sign.
The minimalist interior reveals stairs leading down to a black-painted floor of an L-shaped room dominated by display cases. The exhibit “What’s Inside: A Century of Women and Their Handbags (1900-1999)” is divided by decades. Displayed is a plethora of purses in every imaginable style, color, pattern, texture and material … and a few unimaginable ones: A Bowens Bergeron handcrafted wooden purse, made by artistic duo Tamara Bowens and Ray Bergeron in Atlanta. A telephone cord bag, or “coil purse,” born of the 1940s during a time when traditional materials to make handbags were not available because of the war. Clear Lucite evening purses from the 1950s. A Gucci bag with a bamboo handle from the 1960s. A small evening bag, doubling as cigarette case, from the 1950s. A Meeker bag, tooled leather and metal, from the early 1900s.In addition to being grouped together in “decade” display cases, handbags also hang from above in individual, clear boxes, with stylized mannequins adding pizazz.
Accompanied by various small period items (a bank savings book here, a gum wrapper there) and fellow accessories, the purses tell a story even without the accompanying labels and texts. Mounted on the walls, and in the cases, are photos that help tell the story of the times, including shots of women carrying their purses. (Yes, there’s a Junior League photo.) These invite viewers to not only look, but reminisce and share stories about howtheir mothers, grandmothers or they defined themselves via these fashionable receptacles.
Several inset cases (the others are freestanding) reveal purses grouped by theme: Handbags made of reptile hides. Evening purses. Travel purses and cases, including a large black purse that also served as a phone. And … well, not to reveal too much. After all, says museum founder Anita Davis, she wants people to visit.
This particular day, the most notable bag may be the one carried by Davis: an Italian-made handbag of gunmetal rubber that she plans to offer in the museum’s gift shop. There, more notable handbags, old and new - along with artisan-created jewelry and other items - await.
HOME AT LAST
The museum is the new permanent home for an exhibit that traveled the United States from 2006-11, making stops at such destinations as Concord, Mass.; Baton Rouge, La.; Shreveport; Dallas; Sacramento, Calif.; Seattle; and Little Rock’s Historic Arkansas Museum. The Esse building is the latest in a number of South Main District real-estate acquisitions for Davis, also founder of the area’s Cornbread Festival and Sunday farmers market. “I worked my way down from 1401” - the Bernice sculpture garden street address, says the Murfreesboro native, who is often referred to as the “community advocate” for the area. She bought the Bernice building as well as the Root Cafe building and the Lincoln Building, where the Green Corner Store is. “This [was] the next building,” she says. “I kept looking at it and thinking, ‘That is a great building.’”
When she first laid plans for Esse, Davis says, she didn’t know about the museums in Amsterdam and Seoul.
“Ours is different in that it features the women in America … how women fit in the history of the 20th century. And it tells the story through the purse …. The objects in the purse, and the photographs of women holding their purses, kind of tell the complete story.”
Interestingly, Davis says she had not grown up particularly purse-conscious.
“Mother was always a big shopper, and so I went with her,” she says. “And she always loved beautiful handmade things.” Davis, on the other hand, liked to dig around in the dirt, hunting for such treasures as crystals. She concludes her fascination with purses was subconscious. “My way into this was through flea markets and antique malls … I guess I was just doing a little twist on [my mother’s] taste.”
HUNTING AND GATHERING
Davis’ purse-collecting has been a 25-year odyssey.
“It never did seem like I was really just going after purses,” she says. “I’ve always collected several different things. [Purses] just seemed to fit with my life and what I was learning about life. It seemed to be a way of maybe expressing women’s issues and expressing inner things that could be shown in an outward manner.” Thus comes the museum’s name, Esse, the Latin word for “to be”: The handbag as “an outer expression of a woman’s being.”
It was around the year 2000 that Davis began to consider showcasing her purses in a traveling exhibit. She contacted Melissa Leventon, who owns a museum consultant business called Curatrix Group in San Francisco. Leventon was one of two women who helped Davis with the curation of the exhibit. “We knew that we wanted to make it a little more detailed or a little more deep,” Davis says, “so we decided that we would add the[purse] contents” - compacts, handkerchiefs, even a vintage wrapper for the Wrigley chewing gum that always scented the interior of her Memaw’s purse.
But finding such artifacts was more difficult than finding the purses, Davis recalls. “The hardest thing was finding photographs of women holding their purses,” especially after the 1970s.
She attributes the first challenge to the fact that, by the time a purse gets to a flea market or antique mall, it’s usually empty. The latter trial she attributes to the fact that “people dressed up until the ’60s, and then after that, we got a little sloppier. And you see how the purses looked … more hippie-oriented andthat sort of thing.” Getting the purses themselves was difficult because of women’s reluctance, for sentimental reasons, to give them up.
Nevertheless, Davis has managed to amass 3,000 purses and innumerable purse contents. She says about 300 bags are currently displayed in the museum, which opened June 20.
The museum’s visiting demographic has been mostly women, “but men seem to really enjoy it when you can get them in [here] and they’re very surprised at it.” They enjoy the artifacts as well as the props for the themed displays. The most common comment she hears: “Oh, I wish I hadn’t thrown those purses away” and “I had that one and that one.”
“The overall feeling is it just really takes people to a place of good memories.”
Davis doesn’t have a favorite purse, nor does she want her museum to be about “ designer” purses. But she does have favorite makers, particularly Italian ones. She cites Roberta Di Camerino, who in the ’60s fashioned purses from cut velvet and fitted them with notable clasps. And she’s still thinking about a red Hermes Birkin bag she saw carried by one of two Italian women she met on an airplane flight.
She does have a favorite purse decade - the 1960s. “That’s when I was kind of in my prime, I guess you would say.”
Esse Purse Museum, 1510 S. Main St., Little Rock. Hours are 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Admission is $10 for adults, $8 for 60 and over, military and students (free for children 5 and under). Call (501) 916-9022.
Style, Pages 25 on 07/23/2013