When I saw the Anya Hindmarch £5 charity shopper advertised in a magazine I thought it was a great idea. Donation to charity, a useful and environmentally friendly product, and an Anya Hindmarch label. Although I call myself an iconoclast and publicly berate people who are slaves to labels, I admit I felt a frisson of excitement. Don’t hate me. The media has an influence, and it runs deep.So I signed up to the website to be alerted when the bags went on sale. The alert came at nine o'clock one morning. I logged onto the website which promptly crashed under the strain of demand. An alarm klaxon started up in my head. I hate to be part of any sort of mass movement, especially one as frivolous as this. But the zeitgeist demands that we sheep gambol after the elusive border collie of unavailability, so I persevered. The website was back up the next day and I made my purchase.
When the parcel arrived I felt none of the blissful wonderment I’d anticipated. I had an Anya Hindmarch bag in my hand - the holy grail of modern female achievement - but I felt nothing except incredibly stupidity that I had subscribed to this furore. The bag was a coarse, flimsy affair made of rough hessian. So what if it had a designer label? So what if Lily Cole and Keira Knightley had been seen with them? If you think about it, none of that really matters.
A couple of mouse clicks later and I found the bags selling for over a hundred pounds on EBay. My plan at first was to sell it, give the money back to the charity and send a sanctimonious article to various fashion magazines. But altruism faded with every bid placed, and a week later I had an extra £50 in my bank account and the bag was off my hands. I justified it by rationalising that I wasn't making a profit at the expense of the charity itself, but the fools who place such an inflated value on a piece of canvas with rope handles.
Another 20,000 of them went on sale last month at select branches of Sainsbury’s. People were queuing from 4 a.m. Double-bagging was advised to avoid mugging. Double-bagging a bag that's supposed to eradicate use of plastic bags. Women called in to local radio stations talking about how 'desperate', 'frantic' and 'agitated' they were to get their hands on the prize. One lady woke her two toddler daughters up in the middle of the night to go and queue.
I find the whole debacle ridiculous. Not just this obsession with designer clothes, status and possessions that is turning us into crazed, self-gratifying automata, but the way this particular situation pushes a new level of stupidity. The buzz with designer clothes is that only a select group of people can afford them. You see someone with an Anya Hindmarch bag and you think "They must have a bob or two. Those bags cost hundreds." But with these charity bags, everyone knows they cost £5. Where's the status in that?
One woman on the radio said her quest for a bag stemmed from the isolation she experienced during her school days. Owning an Anya Hindmarch bag would elevate her to previously unattainable levels of popularity and acceptance among her peers. What? If my peer group is as shallow, vacuous and stupid as this bag issue makes them look, acceptance from them is the last thing I want.
Women, for goodness’ sake – get your heads out of Heat magazine and into the real world. Reality isn’t Jade Goody’s latest boyfriend or Danielle Lloyd’s boob job. Stop filling your heads with this useless, meaningless frippery. You put rubbish in, so you’ll get rubbish out. If you’re going to obsess about shopping and celebrities, at least keep your eye on the ball and use those Jimmy Choos to chip away at that damned glass ceiling.
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