Speaking of nutty purchases (see preceding article here), what psycho spends $19,000 on a purse? I’ll get into that in a minute, but first the backstory:
A … $19,000 alligator-skin handbag was destroyed by customs officials in Australia because it entered the country without the correct import license. … While alligator products are allowed into the country, their access is controlled … to ensure they are not linked to the illegal wildlife trade. Although the buyer had secured an export license from Europe, she did not have [an] import permit for Australia …. As a result, the department … confiscated the handbag.”
Ah yes, red tape. (Read news story here.) Reminds me of when I forgot to renew my driver’s license before flying across country and then being stranded at the airport because I couldn’t get a rental car. Permits are everything in today’s world.
Now, to answer the question, who spends half a year’s salary for most people on a purse, obviously someone who wants to show off; but to where and to whom factor into this, because if you go shopping at Target in your designer dress with this swinging at your side, nobody will know what it is, which defeats its purpose.
It is, of course, a great big “F— Y–” and “neener neener.” The physical object is tertiary to its psychological objective. The only point of spending a fortune on a purse is letting other people know you can. Who those people are is highly relevant. Target shoppers won’t recognize a Saint Laurent alligator purse as the obscenely expensive trinket it is, or if they do, won’t give a hoot that you’ve got more money than you can spend constructively. If anything, if you take something like this into a store where rabble shop, they’ll likely conclude you’re not paying enough taxes and email their congressman when they get home. Which brings me back to the question of who does this. Chances are you’re the congressman’s mistress, or maybe the wife of some foreign despot, because most money spent like this is corruption money. At least a lot of people think so. So why do you even want it, knowing that people who know what it is are likely to think that’s what you are? Because some psychos want people to think that’s what they are. I won’t go into the psychology of that, because I don’t understand it myself.
Finally, I can’t help but observe that for real ostentation, a $19,000 purse is a minnow among sharks. If you really want to impress people who don’t like you, buy an aircraft carrier like the one below, which like a $19,000 purse basically says “don’t mess with me,” but says it better.
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I disagree to characterize someone who spends $19,000 on a handbag is a psycho. A more fitting description would be vain, selfish, and very egotistical, who obviously doesn’t care about the environmental issues surrounding the killing of animals or any animals for a handbag to impress oneself, or other people.