A purse phenomenon is sweeping our nation, making headlines in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, InStyle, and Newsday. "The accessories market, whether low- or high-end, is peaking in part because of widespread handbag fever," says Elizabeth Hayt in the New York Times. Today purses are designed to reveal their owner’s personality and add statement to the minimalism of contemporary fashion.

After publishing two magazine articles on purses, Barbara Hagerty set out to further explore purses and their owners. Convinced relationships exist between a woman and her purse, Hagerty interviewed and photographed more than sixty women with their handbags. A purse is, says Hagerty, "more than a mere utilitarian container, a purse is, I realize, an extension of the person who carries it, a miniature portrait in cloth, beads, plastic, leather or feathers."

What started as a photography exhibit, with openings in New York, Washington, D.C., and Hagerty’s home state, South Carolina, is now coming out in book form.

Quirky, hip, and sure to woo hearts with Hagerty’s whimsical photography and humorous anecdotes, Purse Universe captures the essence of today’s purse craze. "On one level," Hagerty describes, "this is Purses and their Owners. On another, it is about the joy, whimsy, and poignancy conveyed by a universal object and the amazing universe of people who carry them." Some may even say, after reading Purse Universe, a purse is the window into a woman’s soul.

"This book is a clutch of delights-glimpses, memories, surprises, dreams- all lovely and revealing and evocative."
-Josephine Humphreys, author of  Rich in Love and Nowhere Else on Earth.

"Barbara Hagerty has a loving and whimsical eye, and her camera has perfectly caught the symbiotic, funny and often poignant relationships between women and their purses. Purse Universe is charming, funny, and oddly touching, and I truly love it."
-Anne Rivers Siddons, author of Colony and Peachtree Road.

"In Purse Universe, writer and photographer Barbara G.S. Hagerty brilliantly addresses that part of the modern woman's costume which, while often amusing, is not merely ornament or convenience; but which instead expresses the very soul of what it is to be feminine through an objet that often echoes in form and shape the very part of the body that grows and nurtures life. This is a book that women will love, and that men will look to to reveal the mystery that is woman."
-Rosemary Daniell, author of Confessions of a (Female) Chauvinist and
Fatal Flowers: On Sin, Sex and Suicide in the Deep South.

Barbara G.S. Hagerty is a writer, photographer and visual essayist who was born in Charleston, SC, and received BA and MA degrees from The Johns Hopkins University.  Her columns, essays, articles and poems have appeared nationwide in a variety of magazines, newspapers and literary journals.  Her visual essays, combining photographic image with text, have been widely exhibited.  She lives with her husband and children in South Carolina, where she divides her time between Charleston and Edisto Island.