Crazy For Vintage Coach!

by Linda Keene
November 29, 2018
4 min read

Coach! So what's the big deal?

I have been into antique and vintage items my whole life. Vintage and antique furniture in my home with collections of everything displayed throughout. I love vintage clothing, vintage jewelry, vintage shoes and boots, and of course, vintage handbags.

I love buying used things. I take great pride in the fact that I am supporting small businesses instead of huge corporations that push fast fashion on us all. It has become a throw-away world. Not for me, ever. I love well-made, time-worn pieces that have already lasted through the needs of the original owner or owners. Buying vintage means that I am not supporting more manufacturing, more destroying of animals for their leather, more digging into the earth for resources, and so on.

In my quest to find great vintage jewelry for my website, I always watch for other great finds. All of these years I have been dragging my little daughter along with me. She's now a 20-year-old college student and future teacher as well as an expert on vintage in her own right.

We love to buy vintage handbags. I favored the old Louis Vuitton bags and was thinking that I was quite the hip chick with my 1985 LV crossbody. Then my daughter bought an old black leather Coach bag at a second-hand store down by the beach. It was a Scooter bag from the 1990s. She lovingly restored it an it looked great when she was done.

She kept telling me how much she loved this bag.

I like the simplicity of the design and the quality of the leather. When the zipper broke on my purse I gave in and bought my first vintage Coach. It's a dark chocolate brown leather bag called the Willis.

I conditioned it and moved in while my LV went to the cobbler for a new zipper. As it turns out, by the time my purse was fixed, I was sold on the old Coach and I never moved back into my LV.

These bags are made of thick-but-soft fine leather. You can work them hard and scratch the leather, but a little leather conditioner makes them look good as new. I have never seen one with a broken zipper. They are not lined and the interior has the suede side exposed, which I appreciate. They have pockets in the right places and feel comfortable in your hand or on your shoulder. I was once a shoulder bag girl, but I am now a crossbody girl.

I carried the dark chocolate brown Willis for month and then I found one in a lighter brown...

Had to have it! This one has more wear than the first, but it has a warm patina that I am so drawn to. I carried this one until I found the deep red classic city flap crossbody bag that I am carrying now for Christmas.

Here it is in brown. Available on my website HERE.

I also have a black backpack that I use at antique shows and flea markets. It's awesome!

The backpacks are harder to find. Especially coveted is the mini backpack here modeled by my daughter.

She's getting one for Christmas and this one is offered right now on my website. We were so thrilled to find this one.

Find it HERE.

My daughter's favorite Coach bag of all time is the Station Bag. It's a great bag for keeping things organized and a good, comfortable crossbody. My best friend loved my daughter's bag so much that we found this one for her for Christmas. (Shhh! Don't tell!)

I'm getting a Station bag for Christmas too!

We went on a buying trip looking for vintage Coach and I started noticing them on shoulders everywhere we went. There was the highest concentration of them at the antique events. It was so fun to see the colors and styles that we don't have.

We are going to continue to collect these bags, and as we find duplicates of the good ones, we'll be offering them on my website.

This post is going to continue to grow; a work in progress as I will next be adding my daughter's collection. She has about 20 vintage handbags. We'll add photos of rare colors and even bags that we did not buy so that this will end up being a long article about all of the different Coach bags that one can collect.

You can find all of the bags that we found for for you HERE.

This is from out private collection. It is a Lunch Box zip that came to us via Deborah. It is mint in box and we are afraid to use it as it is so perfect! C. 1992.