Overview

Purses are much more than fashionable objects containing items women need to go about their daily business. Purses are personal, private places into which only the privileged dare put their hands, vessels of the feminine that hold the essence of a woman's individuality. What's Inside compliments the permanent exhibition of ESSE Purse Museum & Store, offering intimate portraits of this most intimate accessory. Open the book and step inside one of only three purse museums in the world where, decade by decade, you'll conjure the lives and habits of 20th century American women through clutch-sized vignettes and gleaming minaudières of fashion. In these pages, discover evocative photographs of purses and their contents, enticing essays, vibrant artistic renderings, and illuminating historical fictions. While conceptualizing the purse as an extension of a woman's personal space and a reflection of the time in which she lived, we celebrate a century of everyday women. Breathing life into often unnamed heroines, we revere the stylish changemakers whose struggles and triumphs forged the way for generations of women to come.

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9781944528867

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"Anita Davis is a native Arkansan and lifelong collector who loves outsider art, Gladys Knight, dream work, and learning about the mysteries of life. Her varied life experience includes owning a mail-order catalog called Pure and Simple in the 1980s. She has a talent for finding valuables (""They're valuable to me!"") in unexpected places and has led the revitalization of Little Rock's SoMa neighborhood in which ESSE Purse Museum & Store is located. What's Inside is an extension of her endeavor to explore concepts of art, history, and the feminine at ESSE-the only purse museum in the United States and one of only three in the world. The only purse museum in the United States and one of only three in the world, ESSE Purse Museum & Store explores concepts of art, history, and the feminine. The museum is located in the SoMa Neighborhood of Little Rock, Arkansas, and was designed by the book's designer Steven Otis. What's Inside is a collaboration from museum founder Anita Davis, with writers, photographers, and artist Betsy Davis, George Chambers, Laura Cartwright Hardy, Rita Henry, Brandon Markin, and Nancy Nolan."

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