William K. Wolfrum Chronicles

For just $52,500, this crappy handbag can be yours:

“Exclusive Status: It’s in The Bag”

Forget your Coach purse. Put away your Kate Spade. Even Hermes’s famous Birkin bag seems positively discount.

The Louis Vuitton Tribute Patchwork is this summer’s ultimate status bag, ringing in at $52,500. And it is arriving in Washington by the end of the season, ordered by a woman whose circumstances and identity the company has ever so politely (again and again) declined to disclose.

Louis Vuitton’s Tribute Patchwork handbag is made up of pieces of 14 other bags. Five were for sale in North America, and one anonymous person here bought one.
Louis Vuitton’s Tribute Patchwork handbag is made up of pieces of 14 other bags. Five were for sale in North America, and one anonymous person here bought one.

“We find the customer there is a very sophisticated client,” said Brigid Andrews, Northeast regional vice president for Louis Vuitton. “When there’s something that is this special, I’m really not surprised that we had a client who wanted it for her own collection.”

The company made the bag that special not only by price tag and design — 14 LV bags were cut up and sewn together to make it — but also by offering only five for sale in North America and 24 worldwide.

R&B superstar Beyonce Knowles got one. The other four? Their names have not been revealed.

Was the first Gilded Age as boring and silly as this one is rapidly becoming?

–WKW

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Life and Such. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.