That’s why, in the final season of “Succession,” one character mocks another’s date for carrying a “ludicrously capacious” handbag to a family gathering. Her large Burberry bag served to symbolize her misunderstanding of the semiology of the rich and powerful, where membership means no one need schlep so much stuff on their own shoulders. Generally, the more important the person, the smaller the bag. Now Ms. Takaichi is changing the calculus.
Emi Kameoka, the fashion director of Vogue Japan, said that Ms. Takaichi’s bag serves to underscore her image as a professional woman and reinforces her campaign promise to “work and work and work and work.” It can hold both files and tablets, and it telegraphs elegance and utility. Indeed, Hamano sells the Grace Delight Tote as the bag that “answers the desires of career-minded women.”
It is also classically Japanese, Ms. Masuda said, with Hamano having been known primarily for supplying the imperial family. And though, as she noted, the company was previously favored by “very conservative, non-fashion-forward women,” Ms. Takaichi’s patronage has brought it to the attention of a new generation of consumers who see her choice of the bag as a gesture of national pride.
Not to mention a through line that connects Ms. Takaichi to her self-professed political hero, Mrs. Thatcher, whose attachment to her own bag gave the world the term “handbagging,” meaning a surprise tongue-lashing. (Ms. Takaichi also has an affinity for blue jackets and pearls, both of which were Thatcher style signatures.)
For Mrs. Thatcher, the handbag was a way of aligning herself with a respectable Everywoman accouterment at a time when part of the country was uncomfortable with the idea of a female leader and a useful metaphor. Her bag was the kind of bag, British Vogue declared, carried by “a sensible, well-put-together person, reflective of an organized mind.”
But that’s not all it was.
Edwina Currie, a Conservative member of Parliament and health minister for Mrs. Thatcher, called the bag the prime minister’s “weapon.” Mrs. Thatcher herself referred to it as the only “leak proof” place in her government. In 2013, Cynthia Crawford, her onetime personal assistant, wrote a piece in The Guardian noting that “anything that was highly secretive or precious, we would put in her handbag because we knew she was never parted from it.”
The bag became such an effective shorthand for the woman who owned it that in 1988, during Mrs. Thatcher’s final state visit with Ronald Reagan, George Shultz, then secretary of state, gave her a replica of her bag to mark her entry into what he called “the Grand Order of the Handbag.” In 2011, an Asprey bag she carried during an earlier visit sold for $39,800 at a charity auction. By the time she left office, the bags had become, according to the Margaret Thatcher Center, “potent symbols of her unyielding authority.”
Whether Ms. Takaichi’s bag will have the same staying power, influence and historical resonance remains to be seen. But it has already inspired a spike in sales, as well as numerous breathless reports about a “nationwide craze” and “viral sensation.”
“People are paying attention to what she is wearing, much more than they did for male politicians,” Ms. Kameoka of Vogue said. And this particular accessory is, by dint of its size, impossible to miss.
Indeed, according to the Hamano website, the company has had so many requests for the black Grace Delight Tote that its current production run is sold out, and the company is “currently receiving orders equivalent to approximately 10 months’ worth of factory production.”
Hamano currently plans to ship the bag at the end of August next year.