It starts with my mother, an obsessive collector of old stuff. She never threw away her possessions. Instead, the old ones went into boxes and more boxes in the closet. She had a walk-in closet with one section devoted to old relics of bygone fashion eras.

And as you know, old fashions come back into fashion if you wait long enough.

I myself was a college girl who wanted to look lazy and poor and things like that. You know college girls. They want to make an impression, to be in with the crowd, to rebel against the accepted, and so on. I had a rucksack to carry things, everything. The same sack served me when I went out in the evening. Functionality was everything, not some silly old fashioned fashion.

It was around this time that I came across the Gucci handbag. It was a clutch handbag of the 1970's, with a green and red stripe of ribbon around the middle. It was also covered by the famous insignia, the two little interlocking G's proclaiming it to be Gucci. Handbag aficionados will immediately recognize it for it was - pure vintage, that too cute vintage. To get one like that, you would have had to spend a few hundred dollars at the store.

I got it free from mom's closet collection. Mom had long forgotten that she owned such a thing.

I began to carry it around, and did it transform my life! Here was I wearing a ten dollar tee shirt and an old pair of jeans and sneakers, with a Gucci in my hand. People saw me not as a sloppy old gal but as someone who knew what she was doing. After all, she has an expensive Gucci. If she can afford it, certainly she can afford more than the ten-dollar thing if she wanted. So she must know what she is doing.

At least that was how I saw myself. And as it turned out, I was not much off the mark. People saw me differently.

Since then, I have followed that fashion principle, saving a small fortune in the process. I don't buy pricey designer clothes. I do not keep up with expensive new fashion trends, only to find that they have become out of fashion in a few weeks or months.

Instead, I save up my money and get just the right kind of accessory handbag once in a while. Usually, these are gorgeous, vintage designer handbags. And pair it with both elegant eveningwear and sweats, and all kinds in between. And people think I know what I am doing.

How's that for a life transformation, brought by an accessory handbag!