Thursday, December 11, 2008

Style Spy Gets Her Martha Stewart On

This weekend I took on a little interior design project that I've been planning for some time.

















Aided by a sale on picture frames at Michael's, I finally framed some shopping bags from some of my favorite perfume purchases. In a happy coincidence, the color palettes all worked really nicely together and also worked with the color scheme in my bedroom. No one is going to mistake my work for a professional's, but I'm pretty happy with it.
Now if I could just figure out what to do with the stack of great big full-sized shopping bags in my closet that I can't bear to part with.

I love shopping bags -- they're this great little utilitarian piece of design. That Ormonde Jayne bag above (bottom left) is made with some of the most gorgeous, heavy, slightly glossy paper I've ever seen, and the side gussets of the bag are orange. I have a bag from Takashimaya (where I bought my beloved Jasmin de Nuit, which is -- ::sob!:: almost gone) that is three-sided. Some magical origami wizard must have designed that one, but I
can't figure out a way to display that one & do it justice. My Valentino shopping bag (red satin bow-sided peep-toe pumps) is absolutely beautiful -- the paper is so heavy it's almost fabric, and the handles are gorgeous double-sided satin ribbons. My shopping bags are a bit like a photo album -- they remind me of not only the thing that I carried home in them, but the circumstances surrounding the purchase, like where I was and who I was with. The Ormonde Jayne bag contained a bottle of my beloved Tolu and made its way into my hands while I was in the company of two of my dearest friends while on a visit to London. From there we went to Fortnum's and had tea in the café. And the bag from Malle was handed to me by my friend Tiphaine, who had stuffed it chock full o' samples of all the Malle fragrances. I carried it around all night while she & Corinne & I enjoyed wine & perfume in the Marais. A lovely memory.

So how about you? Do you have a favorite shopping bag? What came in it? Does it have a story?



Photo: Style Spy





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4 comments:

Susan B said...

That's so clever! I love the small paper shopping bags with the ribbon handles, but I'm afraid I don't treat them with much reverence; I use them as lunch bags!

Anonymous said...

wow - i also have a gorgeous ormonde jayne bag that i used for months & months - i finally killed it off travelling to USA and abused it turning it into a nappy bag with all the baby food jars & nappies and clothes and it gave up!
i love the clever shape and thick boaty look but soft black strings

Sian said...

Love my OJ bags too. I don't have Malle bags still, but have wonderful memories of that first trip to the store in Paris. Quite frequently though, looking at shopping bags just makes me feel guilty!

Anonymous said...

Love the display - looks great! Several of my bags are the same as yours - for obvious reasons!! But I have been known to use my serge lutens bag as, indeed, a lunch bag. Kinda satisfying, carrying my satsumas and ryvita around in a serge bag. Otherwise, I use them on my bookshelves to store letters / photos. Oh, and I have a lovely purple liberty bag that I use for my perfume sample stash. Do you have one of them? The BEST colour purple, ever! xxCaroline