My Summer Bag Is Underrated, Inexpensive...and Celine

This vintage piece is reckless glamour at its finest.

There will be a NEVERWORNS Live! Shopping episode featuring seven saucy, sexy, and sumptuous Michael Kors-era Celine Boogie bags on Sunday, April 13th at 7pm EST. Click here to sign up and watch the sale…and SHOP. Now, read the history below where I interview industry veterans about the It bag that never got enough love…and dive in.

The Celine Boogie Bag in Sex and the City

I got my hands on the sexiest, most underrated It bag: the Michael Kors-era

Celine Boogie. My version is black and stitched in swirls of white thread. Forget going into the office with it: The Boogie is too small for a laptop. Yet, it’s neither fit for a formal evening: The bag is too big for a black tie outing. The Boogie lives in a chic impossible limbo; killer with a luxurious riskiness thanks to its shallow, hand-held design. You're fabulously confined to what your bag can or cannot hold. That’s bitchy. That’s rich.

This isn’t my first foray into Boogie bag-dom. A few years ago, in a NEVERWORNS episode with vintage dealer Brandon Giordano of James Veloria, he unearthed a delicious black leather Michael Kors-era Celine Boogie bag. The bag was well designed: Sturdy like a Volvo, shaped like a flared domino, and fashioned out of an impervious, girthy leather.

A cornucopia of Boogies!

Giordano and I loved the Boogie because the beautiful, bitchy lady bag tapped into what Michael Kors’s tenure at Celine represented: unabashedly hot, sexy cash. These were clothes made for women perpetually stepping off a helicopter. They needed a bag. No, not a shoulder bag: This Celine woman never wore a bag on the shoulder! That would be too much of a strain. A peasant’s burden! In this rabidly opulent universe, a bag had to be as light as a feather, held in the hand with the ease of someone pinching a teacup handle. That’s true wealth. That’s true luxury. The freedom not to carry. Never to schlep.

Vogue October 2002

The Boogie bag should have taken off.