Susannah Clapp's Delightful "At the V&A"

Emily Jo Gibbs's horse chestnut bag (1996)

The last couple of days, I’ve been holding the image of Emily Jo Gibbs’s green spiked horse chestnut bag in my mind, enjoying its ingenious design. A photo of it illustrates Susannah Clapp’s delightful “At the V&A,” in the May 20th London Review of Books. Clapp’s piece reviews the Victoria and Albert Museum’s Bags: Inside Out, an exhibition of handbags, purses, suitcases, and other forms of “the ultimate accessory.” Clapp writes,

The curator, Lucia Savi, has brought together items so varied in appearance and function, so 17th and so 21st century, so cosmopolitan and so country, so Myanmar and so Anya Hindmarch, so differently Turkish inflected – an 18th-century goat leather portfolio from Istanbul and a woollen suitcase from Tracey Emin – that ‘bags’ begins to look less like a category than an all-encompassing, constantly changing force. After seeing this show, it would be impossible to say that bags are not your bag. The items on display include a sturdy container for a Second World War gas mask; a delicate 2019 bucket woven from bamboo, silk and leather; a Versace pouch punctured with safety pins; and – hello, Lucy Ellmann – a tasselled 18th-century falconry bag whose inside pockets are embroidered with a woman in a scarlet slit of a skirt, a man with boots and a big horn, and a dead animal. Here is 17th-century filigree from Germany – silver wires twisted into the shape of a heart – and 20th-century jangle from Paris, supplied by Paco Rabanne’s chainmail belt bag.

Clapp is a superb describer. For example:

Supreme among the creations of the last century is the sleek, black ‘Normandie’ clutch, opulently framed in a crimson box. Created to celebrate the maiden voyage of the ocean liner Normandie in 1935, and presented as a gift to first-class passengers, it mirrors the sloping wedge of the ship, with a tiny metal anchor looped on the side and on top three gleaming clasps in the shape of funnels. The wit of the translation is made gloriously apparent by a photograph of the ship, with lights streaming from its portholes into the water.

Clapp’s piece celebrates the “barmy bravura” of the V&A bags. I enjoyed it immensely.