There's excess ... and then there's Victoria Beckham. In these times when buying two toilet seats in two years is seen as extravagant (see John Prescott's expenses), Beckham has upped the ante with a handbag collection worth £1.5m.
A US financial website recently totted up the amount that she has spent at Hermès buying these "investment" pieces (so-called because they are the price of an average family car). It is a staggering amount, particularly because it relates only to one design: the Hermès Birkin.
Beckham apparently owns 100 versions of it, all absolutely identical, give or take the colour, material and size.
Where does this obsession - because that is surely what it is - come from? The bag is certainly covetable. Designed in 1984 and named after the actress Jane Birkin, the style has become a fashion classic because its huge cost (around £5,000 for the basic style), superior workmanship (it is hand-made) and endless waiting list (currently between two and five years) mean it is out of reach for all but the super-rich and super-connected.
Beckham even owns the pièce de résistance of the Birkin family - the silver Himalayan, complete with its own three-carat diamond, which costs a cool £80,000 and is one of only three in the world.
But it is the logistics of it all that are particularly troubling. Where does Beckham keep this enormous clutch of bags? One can imagine them all lined up in a hangar-sized dressing room ordered by size and colour, like a Technicolor Hermès rainbow. Perhaps she has a quota per house and a few on the jet, just in case?
Surely, though, this is only the tip of her accessory iceberg. Is there a Louboutin mountain somewhere in the far recesses of her endless wardrobe? Or perhaps an elephants' graveyard of Roland Mouret dresses?
