eBay Guides - Vintage COACH Leather Handbags Cashin, Quality Part 1

Is a Coach bag really rare? Vintage? How can it be kept in great condition so it might gain value in hard-core Collector circles? Who was Bonnie Cashin and what relationship did she have with COACH? What safe-guards can I use to portect me from buying an illegal foreign import? This article will help you with your eBay buying savvy, and help you enjoy your treasure. Compiled & edited by a leather seamstress and Coach Collector, this article provides some worthwhile facts. Photo examples of some bags are at the end of Part 1; Leather Care and Buying Used Tips are in Part 2.

Vintage COACH Handbags: Cashin, Quality & Style

Bonnie Cashin and Thomas Edison shared the same dictum: "If it works, it's beautiful". However, Bonnie Cashin added,
"Make things as lightweight as possible--as simple as possible--as punchy as possible--as inexpensively as possible!"

The bags Cashin designed for COACH from 1962 to 1972 live up to the asethetic of vivid color and bold form innovations of the career girl's handbag. These 1970 design ideas carried on in the current COACH line.

Fascinated by dance and playing with silky remnants in her mothers custom dress making shop, Bonnie found a passion for sensuous, quality materials transported onto the moving body. Working as a wardrobe mistress for Broadway shows in the 1930s, she dressed chorus girls. In the 40s, she designed flamboyant costumes for 20th Century Fox, while she wore strignently minimal Mao jackets and slim leather. Her personal style laid down the foundations for American Sportswear. Bonnie Cashin was perpetually paring back--putting coin-purse pockets on canvas raincoats, traveling to Asia to collect baskets and textiles, trimming tweed with leather, and yanking toggles off her convertible sports car to fasten per poncho.

As early as 1954, Cashin was teaming pink and aqua leather and sprigged cotton, denim and silk shantung. When Miles & Lillian Cahn approached her to design accessories for their new company, COACH, in the early 1960s, she consented. Cashin's first bag for Coach was a portable sling, somewhere between a kangaroo's pouch and a nifty oversized pocket. A coin purse was attached to the outside and it was wittily christened the "Cashin Carry". Bonnie drew her ideas directly onto her canvas prototypes. Her sketches were accompanied by copious notes in the early 1960s.

Bonnie Cashin insisted on a capacious hobo or fabric shopper with shoulder straps, and began making her own as early as 1955, but the houslder bag didn't become almost an office uniform until the early 70s. Whether a canvas tote cramed with papers, a nylon pouch, or a classy COACH in richly colored leather, a bag on the shoulder was a sign that women were bonded (physically as well as socially) to their work. In stark opposition to the conventional handbag, the utility bag of the 70s symbolized everything practical and action-packed. In true feminist spirit, the bag was now a tool rather than a mere decoration.

Simplifying fashion with her soft leather totes and carry-alls, she provided welcome respite from overly feminine style. She captured the essential sportwear spirit by paring back the bag to its purly functional qualities and by mixing very expensive materials with more informal ones: tweed and denim, kid and canvas. Cheery bright colors of abstract art and the minimal forms of sculture, her body bags are little more than a kangaroo pouch, and its shape has echoed through every decade since then. Cashin was obsessed with the relationship between use and form, utility, devoted to fun, saturated with color and Cashin spearheaded extra pockets and satellite bags way ahead of her time.

Pouches, pockets and kimono sleeves--all sorts of practical shapes inspired Bonnie Cashin. Many of her bags were simply designed to be carried on the forearm--all part of her grab it and go sportswear philosophy. Next came leather shopping bags in three sizes--large, medium, and dinky. Based on the paper grocery bag, these bags pulverized the notion that a woman need only to carry keys, cash lipstick and a hankie. Cashin believed in the dignity of housing "stuff", in wearing 3 bags on one arm and layering one bag within another. The contemporary need for satellite bags was anticipated by Cashin's desire to carry 3 at a time, stacked neatly on the forearm and sprouting one or two at the wrist. Bonnie despised the single black alligator bag. After her visit to India in 1956, she developed her own shade of candy pink and had COACH make up brilliantly hued ice-cream colors in special limited-edition madras, Cashin liked proto-pop contrasts and textural wit. Acid mustard trimmed in pink, rustic olive-green tweeds edged in lime and subtle russet reds were her antidotes to stodgy suburban style.

For easier access, she slapped pockets on the sides of her Hero Lunch Box, outfitted with the slenderest of evening bags iwth outlandish front coin pokets, and made her day bad shoulder straps broad and pliable enough not to dig in. By the late 60s her designs were enjoying widespread, low-budget imitation and were delivering a generaion of women into the no-fuss liberation of the 70s. For that general of feminists, a Cashin Coach bag was a low-key status symbol, both utilitarian and classy. When Coach revived her 1970 Body Bag for her retrospective at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York in 2000, the bag continued to prove a revolutionary force-defying frou-frou cocktail purses and fussy fastenings. Matches with some original 1960s goves and a vintage Cashin coin purse, the look is still good to go! There are bags that work like a call to action.

The 90s working girl flirted iwth androgenous and futuristic styles" the messenger bag, the fanny pack, the belt pouch, and version of Bonnie Cashin's pouch-like Body Bag for COACH, but the style that still reigns supreme is the Mother Ship and Dinghy. Bags within bags have become the norm for women who need a life beyond work.

[COACH is a registered trademark of the COACH Company. The presenter of this article, gadgetsngoods, is not an employee or representative of COACH, although is a collector & currently thinning the collection via eBay Auctions throughout 2006]