As you all know, I’ve been working on pairing down my clothes and accessories the last couple of years. (Slow and steady wins the race people!) One area I cut down significantly is the number of handbags and purses I own.
When I started my mission to simplify my life and my closet, I owned 17 bags and I narrowed it down to 10. Since then I haven’t acquired any new bags, but I haven’t gotten rid of any either. 10 seems to be my number, at least for now.
Although I will likely be parting with one of my favorite purses soon as it’s getting really worn and shabby looking, which is not conducive to wearing with my office professional looks. 🙁 I’m actually pretty bummed about it and I might look for a replacement for it. But we’ll just have to see if I come across one as awesome in the future.
Here’s the criteria I used to narrow my handbags down to the current 10 I own:
- Neutrals – I kept one black and one brown purse as these go with anything (except brown doesn’t go with black and vice versa). Having a couple of neutral colored purses is a great place to start when narrowing down your handbags. Personally, I don’t see any need to keep multiple purses of the same neutral color so I kept only one black and one brown bag. My black purse is solid, but my brown bag is a brown and white giraffe print.
- Metallic – I also decided to keep my champagne metallic purse because it’s also a neutral with some fun added via the metallic finish. The metallic finish also makes it look a little more “dressy” if you need a handbag for a fancier occasion.
- Sizes – I did keep a smaller clutch-like bag for nights when I don’t want to be bogged down by a large purse. This gives my bag “collection” a little more versatility.
- Colors and Prints – Select a few of your favorite colors and prints to keep. My favorite colors are purple and teal, so I kept one teal bag and two purple bags in different shades. I did get rid of at least one other purple bag as it seemed redundant and I kept the higher quality one.
That’s how I decided to narrow down my bags and only keep the ones I felt were most versatile. I got rid of a green bag and I liked, but it only matched like 2 of my outfits so I didn’t feel like it was getting very much use for the amount of space it was taking up.
Like I mentioned, I also got rid of one purple purse and I also decided to part with one Vera Bradley purse because I had two in the same pattern, which seemed a little crazy.
How many handbags do you own? How do you decide which ones to keep and which ones to toss? How often do you wear out a purse?
