Sophie Lioe tries to keep her temper while advising us that sometimes it’s just best to fake it

“I’m holding this bag on the crook of my arm so you can all see how cool I am with GUCCI written on every spare space of the fake cheap PVC of this ultra-classy handbag I picked up on a street corner in Torremolinos last month! Don’t I fit it?!” That’s what might as well be emblazoned across the suitcase-sized handbags dangling off the arms of misguided fashionistas. One question: why?

Clearly the aim of these handbags is to proclaim to the general public something along the lines of ‘I know this brand is cool, therefore I am too’ – except it clearly states the exact opposite. Surely those in the know realise that discretion, as well as individuality, is key. Since when did it all become about names? Chanel is quite exclusive, but there’s no need for it to be the one and only reason to buy a bag.

By all means, buy fakes. We aren’t all (unfortunately!) the spoilt offspring of multi-millionaire New York businessmen in our Upper East Side penthouses that splash our cash at the nearest Louis Vuitton boutique when we’re bored of enduring another Management Accounting lecture. Therefore, fakes are the next best thing for us mere mortals who spend our weekends trawling through the bargain buckets at Penneys.

Just choose your fakes well: how well a brand name is etched across the side isn’t the basis subtlety for good taste. Christian Dior didn’t spend his life cutting his name out of dodgy-looking plastic so it could be stuck onto some even worse looking fake leather. We can all read, but sadly not all of us have good taste.

Maybe we should start a campaign against this. Let’s buy the trashiest handbags we can find and scrawl our names in unflattering lines all over the thing. Maybe then people will start to get the hint that maybe what makes a bag cool is the actual design and not what’s written on it.