“A HANDBAG?” Lady Bracknell exclaims in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest; “You can hardly imagine that I and Lord Bracknell would dream of allowing our only daughter—a girl brought up with the utmost care—to marry into a cloak-room, and form an alliance with a parcel?”
Scandalous as it might seem to Lady Bracknell, it appears Cherwell has unwittingly done just that: in true Wilde spirit, we seem to have gained a handbag for a namesake. The object in question is stamped tastefully with a small gold tree, designating it as made by Mulberry – who are, as we all know, a pretty big name when it comes to small objects vaguely used for transporting things.
“I have a Bayswater, my son’s grandmother has a Bayswater, Kate Moss has a Bayswater,” Emma Hill, Mulberry’s Creative Director in 2013, once said of an iconic Mulberry handbag. Similarly, I work at Cherwell, I row down the Cherwell, I live by the Cherwell, and now I could also own a Cherwell. Theoretically speaking. Could Kate Moss boast as much?
Johnny Coca, Mulberry’s creative director as of mid-2015, is all about bags – and Mulberry bags are practically British institutions. Their bags come in London boroughs. Their bags come in tasteful, muted colours. And one of Mulberry’s recent unveilings at the London Fashion Week has the critics raving, as you can get ’em now in Cherwells and Pembrokes too – inspired, we suppose, by the sophistication, class and subtle elegance of Oxbridge. Or something. Clearly they haven’t ever emerged from Cellar at 3am, sweatily, to grab a kebab at Hassan’s.
In keeping with Mulberry’s Summer ’17 collection as a whole, both Cherwells and Pembrokes are eerily reminiscent of school uniforms. The Cherwell in particular boasts a base of good-quality leather in tasteful navy (or a classy, muted deep red – we’re spoilt for choice), and comes with optional stripes, for that maximum school-tie effect you’ve been craving. It is a triumph of subtle design reinvention. It also vaguely resembles a lunch box, though we can be assured that this was an intentional and clever riff; Coca cites the humble relic of primary school days as a chief inspiration for his new design.
Don’t get me wrong, this is not to put down the look of the Cherwell; it’s a masterful bit of handbaggery. I’ve never seen a lunchbox that looked so patriotic, nor so chic. Besides, the bag in question retails for a cool £850, and at that price, in the words of the Financial Times, it’s “far, far too lovely to sully with sandwiches.” Well, maybe we’d consider doing so if the sandwich were gilt-edged – or is that too flashy? Edged with tasteful tartan, perhaps.
Considering your price tag, Cherwell handbag, I have but this to say: you are quite literally the handbag of our dreams. You are the bag of nostalgia-tinged British school-days, minus itchy starch and soggy sandwiches. You are a diminutive yet worthy, boxy yet classy, elegant yet practical expression of the fashion industry’s self-conscious half-irony. Your colours are reserved, yet resonate with a quiet and tasteful luminance. You are ultimately a tribute to that bastion of British bromidicity – the humble school lunch.
