We seek consignments for specific pieces, not just any handbag of a particular vintage. People will contact me about a bag and I’ll tell them whether it’s right for our market. We’re always looking for Hermès, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Gucci. Those consistently garner the best price. But then there’s Lucille de Pari, who’s known for her incredible ’50s and ’60s crocodile and alligator purses.
We’re always looking for the three Lucite names I was mentioning—Wilardy, Florida Handbags, and Patricia of Miami. With handbags, we’re always looking for an array of bags by the designers who were synonymous with their decade, and we’re predominantly interested in the 20th century. We don’t really see anything older than that, but we would handle one if we got one. Certain museums are very interested in being able to represent a range of bags in their institutions.
We get some pretty interesting stuff. For example, in our last auction, we had a telephone bag. It was made in the shape of a telephone, had a dial on the front, the owner’s name (“Patricia of Chicago”), and a telephone number. Anne Marie of Paris, who was known for making handbags in the shapes of things like champagne bottles, made the bag in the 1960s. She was ahead of her time because we saw a lot of that sort of thing in the ’80s and ’90s.