Hand Picked, The Gold Clutch Bags Worth Shopping

I have owned a gold clutch since roughly 1994, and I want to say up front that this is a category I trust the way I trust a car I’ve had serviced too many times. You know its problems. You keep driving it anyway.

The one I bought last month photographs beautifully. I stood under a bathroom light at a wedding, took a picture for my sister, and the thing looked like it belonged to someone with considerably more discipline than I have. By hour four, sitting on a folding chair with a plate of cake balanced somewhere, it had slid open twice, and the finish that looked so rich in the flash photo was reading as slightly orange under the reception’s overhead lighting, which nobody warns you about.

Gold does something specific and not always flattering under a fluorescent office tube versus a phone flash versus actual daylight, and a clutch you tried on once in a shop mirror at noon has told you approximately none of that.

The inside pocket situation is where the standing disagreement in my house actually lives, though nobody brings it up until we’re both digging through the same bag looking for a lipstick. My sister thinks a pocket inside a clutch this small is decorative at best, a place to lose a lipstick with extra steps, and she’s not entirely wrong, I have fished a hotel key out of the lining more than once wondering how it got past the actual pocket meant for it.

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I maintain that a pocket, even a slightly useless one, keeps my phone from scratching against a compact, which counts as a job well done in a bag this size. Neither of us has ever won this argument and I don’t expect we will tonight either.

I’ll admit the very structured, boxy gold clutch is a gamble. It looks sharp on someone with the wrist strength and the patience to hold a rigid frame under one arm all evening, and slightly like she’s carrying a lunchbox on someone who doesn’t. I am, some nights, the lunchbox woman, and I’ve made peace with it.

What’s actually earned its place, the one from 2003 that’s outlasted three purses I bought since specifically to replace it, is soft enough to fold into a bigger bag on the way home and doesn’t announce itself under bad light the way the stiffer ones do. I’d like to have a word with the woman who bought her first metallic clutch purely because it matched one dress. Gold doesn’t match, exactly, it just doesn’t clash, which took me longer to learn than it should have.