The airplane handbag is stupid, but not because it looks like an airplane

Louis Vuitton’s latest handbag collection includes airplane-shaped bag that costs more than an actual airplane:

$39,000.

You can purchase a Cessna 150 for about $30,000, making this handbag more expensive the flying machine that inspired its design.

Seems ridiculous, of course, but as you probably know, the entire handbag industry is a damn joke. A cesspool of products with four-digit profit margins designed to allow owners to publicly display their wealth in the form of a container for their credit cards, breath mints, and privilege.

There are currently dozens of handbags on the Louis Vuitton website costing as much as $6,000, and Louis Vuitton’s most expensive handbag of 2020 cost $42,000, making the stupid airplane bag look like a bargain.

But Louis Vuitton is a middle-of-the-pack brand when it comes to luxury handbags. Chanel produced a handbag in 2020 that cost $261,000, Lana Marks sold one for $250,000, and Mouawad topped the list in 2020 with a bag that retailed for $3.8 million, though it admittedly contains enough diamonds to choke a small cat or large chicken.

All of this kind of disgusts me.

I have never been a fan of ostentatious, pretentious, cloying displays of wealth. I find the need to publicly indicate the size of your bank account via your handbag, fur coat, luxury watch, or gold-plated toilet a little sad, a little pathetic, and very unfortunate.

If the hole in your self esteem is so large that you need an airplane-shaped handbag or golden toilet to fill it, you have a serious problem.

Recently, someone spent minutes of my life – unprompted – showing me the watch affixed to their wrist. “A Hublot,” he stated with pride, rotating his wrist to ensure that I saw the band as well as the timepiece. Then he started to explain to me why the Hublot – a brand I had never heard of prior to this moment – is the best watch brand on the market, but I had already stopped listening.

I was thinking this:

“You poor, little man. I think what you really need is a hug.”

But you can’t show off a hug. A hug doesn’t tell the people around you that you have a lot of money. A hug may be joyous and soul-filling, but it’s also intangible and fleeting.

Nothing compared to a golden toilet seat or a diamond-encrusted handbag.

Right?