Hi all,
Here's a nice article I found. Tot to share it with everyone :)
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An article by: Jaimee Rose
Think of what women are willing to do for a designer purse.
They will, in high heels, chase a mugger through rush-hour traffic to wrestle for a beloved bag. They will spend a Saturday night at home, in computer bidding wars with other girls over a rare blue Hermes Birkin Bag on eBay, for which the winner will happily pay $13,500. (Really. That was just this week.) **Of course, this is where ReplicaSi comes in** And when they must suddenly stop in traffic, their arm will fly across the passenger seat almost on its own to protect the bag from tumbling - like some freakish maternal/leather-protection instinct.
All of this, of course, is over nothing but a scrap of leather, and it seems so very silly, but only to those who do not understand.
In the world of designer handbags, there are three camps: You get it (and you pay for it), you don't get it or you get it but you can't afford it, which, of course, is the largest, by far. **We can help you here.**
The purse is the accessory that encapsulates a woman's identity - her driver's license, her hopeful to-do list, her favorite lipstick. The designer purse is the accessory that betrays a woman's frivolity - and what a worthy frivolity it is. (So easy to justify. You use it every day, and for years. There, now go buy that $500 Louis Vuitton pochette.)
Where to buy real
eluxury
Net-a-Porter
Bluefly
Neiman Marcus
Where to buy fakes:
www.ReplicaSi.com
ReplicaSi.com
and ReplicaSi *Heh*
If you get it, and can buy it, a lot of women hate you. Nicole Wagner is one of those girls. The 21-year-old Paradise Valley resident owns four designer handbags - a red Kate Spade, a black Kate Spade, a blue Gucci and a little black Prada that's not technically a Prada, but really, who can tell? (More on that later.) And here is why she has them:
"I guess it's just the idea of having an $800 purse on my shoulder," she says, referring to the Gucci, which she bought on consignment and did not pay $800 for, the lucky girl. "I just love carrying it around. I get a lot of compliments. It's almost like a status symbol."
A designer handbag is, in fact, all about the display of symbols, the little interlocking Gucci G's, the Chanel C's, the offset LV of Louis Vuitton. It is the proof of taste, the proof of money, a silent "I am someone" message that only fellow label lovers know how to read. Witness this at a Phoenix Junior League meeting, a virtual alphabet soup.
The designer symbols also are tickets to another world, namely, designer boutiques.
A few weeks ago, Wagner went into Hermes in Las Vegas, a store where there are four-year waiting lists for purses with four-digit price tags.
"I had my Gucci purse," Wagner says, "and the first thing the (sales) lady looked at was my purse. Then she looked at me. Then the purse, and she was like, 'Hi!' all excited to open cabinets for me. You get treated differently in nice stores if you've got a great purse."
A designer purse is proof, after all, that you've spent insane amounts of money on small objects before and just may be willing to do it again.
Heather Vandenberghe, vice president of marketing for Louis Vuitton North America, says that customer behavior in designer boutiques is particular (and a little peculiar).
"Customers visit an item they're wanting," Vandenberghe says. They court it, or drop by at lunch to say "hi," before taking the plunge. And these kinds of people actually do handbag research. They ask for their beloved by name. "They will know the name of the bag, the name of the leather," she adds. (Vandenberghe herself still has to look it up.)
Listen to the love of a woman for a good designer bag:
"I have to tell you that the purse wasn't my first love, shoes were, but it all started with The Baby," says Toni Kyle, 40, a Phoenix mom. " I was always on the hunt for the perfect backpack. I didn't want a real structured one. I wanted loose, but leather, and then one day I was in LA, at Fred Segal, and there it was in front of me - $300! It was like I was searching for my Holy Grail, and there it was, so I bought it, the most I'd ever spent on a bag. I thought, 'I'll use it for years, and that makes it so cheap!' I didn't even have a job at the time, and I bought this bag.
"It became The Baby. I took it everywhere. It was the love of my life. I hated changing purses. I felt you had to be committed. I used it for four years, and then I got sick of it."
So she put in her closet, where it lives now (as if she could part with The Baby).
Retiring happens to every bag once or twice in its life, but a designer purse always gets a second life on eBay, where, on a recent Thursday, there were 32,469 handbags for sale. (There's even an eBay purse-party trend making its way around the country, where girls get together and help each other virtually shop.)
Now, if you've never been to the Kate Spade section of eBay, can't discern a Gucci G from a Guess G, and really don't understand any of this nonsense, then count your ignorance as bliss and know your savings balance will always be safe.
If you want to experience this, but can't afford it, here is what you do:
You buy fake. Wagner has her little faux Prada, and few can tell the difference. When Kyle put away The Baby, her next major purse was a knockoff Kate Spade.
"I would see all these people in LA with Kate Spade, even Kate Spade diaper bags. That's $300. For diapers. I thought, 'I can't fall into this trap.' But I had to have the Kate Spade bag. I lusted for it. I had this unfulfilled need, but I could not get myself to pay that much money for it."
When Kyle found a woman who sells Spade-inspired totes (she calls the woman her "LA Connection"), she bought one, and then she told all of her friends, jubilant.
Some women are too ashamed to carry a copy. Then again, there are even some women who are ashamed to carry last year's Kate Spade. But some women, and let's just say they're the lucky ones, can't tell the difference between Fendi and faux, and don't know that Gucci embosses tracking numbers on the inside of its bags or that a real Fendi bag will have an insignia on the zipper.
For these women, there exists, on the Internet, a sort of secret world of fake designer handbags, Web sites that sell designer copies until they get shut down for copyright violations, and then move somewhere else until they get shut down again. It's like Napster, but for girls.
There is a "why" to all of this - the reason that the secret Internet world is made of purses and not pants.
Louis Vuitton's Vandenberghe says that a designer bag is instant status, instant style. "No matter how bad your hair looks that day, you can always feel like you have a cute purse," she says.
Barbara Hagerty, author of Handbags: A Peek Inside a Woman's Most Trusted Accessory, says that to wear a designer handbag, "you never have to go on a diet."
"They always fit."
Hagerty also offers a more concrete explanation:
"Purses are a huge part of feminine culture. I imagine that ever since the first cave woman walked out of her cave, carrying a baby, and had to have something to put twigs and berries in, she had to have some sort of a sack or a purse. It's a basic part of primordial equipment for facing life. Your whole life is in that bag."
As for your status in life, well, that depends on who made it.
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I really really want a dog, it's a choice between one of these (above) or a pug or a King Charles Spaniel! But really I have only put this blog on to try try try to figure out how to include pictures in my blog! 
