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Ten years ago your handbag was just a receptacle for purse and keys. Nowadays it's a fashion statement that says more about you than anything else in your wardrobe. Judy Rumbold casts a quizzical eye over a decade of it-bags and the celebrities who have wielded them

Ten years ago no one made a lot of noise about handbags. They were simply humdrum accessories, along with shoes and jewellery, that added the finishing touches to clothes. They were practical, functional and not at all sexy. How things have changed. Due to clever marketing, celebrity endorsement and, it seems, feverish acquisitiveness on a monstrous scale, the world has gone mad for bags. The more the better. One for every outfit. In every colour and size and myriad combinations of pulse-quickening studs, tassels, quilting and hardware. Now bags are cult items, must-have accessories for which ordinarily sensible women will submit to all sorts of indignities - interminable waiting-lists, unseemly bidding wars on eBay, hissy fits in department-store handbag departments. All because they saw Sienna Miller carrying it in Heat. Is there a woman alive who isn't infected by it-bag fever? Is there a man alive who has the faintest idea why handbags suddenly cost a month's salary? And it all started a decade ago with one little bag from Fendi…

1998 Fendi Baguette

Being named after a loaf may not sound all that promising on paper, but this is the style widely credited as the original it-bag. Designed by Silvia Venturini Fendi to tuck neatly under the arm like French bread, the early designs featured the double-F logo created by Karl Lagerfeld when he began working for the company in 1962. The hype surrounding the Baguette began after the company held a legendary sample sale in New York in December 1997. The bags had yet to take off, and the company offered them to fashion insiders, including many magazine editors, for the breathtakingly low price of £25 each, or £50 for the fur variety. Shortly afterwards, during the European fashion collections in March 1998, armies of fashion folk turned up flaunting their cut-price Baguettes. They were widely photographed, and an it-bag was born. Now more than 600 versions of the Baguette exist, ranging from a £200 black nylon one to a hand-loomed style costing £6,000.

1999 Prada Bowling

The polar opposite of the Baguette - more of a sandwich loaf - but welcomed by women whose daily haul stretched to more than a lipstick and credit card. Time has shown that celebrity likes a big bag - it says, 'I have stuff to carry, I am going places' - because it helps promote the impression that their lives aren't as shallow and pointless as all that. Inside a big bag there may well be frilly pants and make-up, but who says there isn't also a film script and even - whisper it - a book or two? Where the outsized ostrich-skin Prada bag gained legions of fans for functionality, it lost out in the sexy-name stakes. It seems that roomy bags are the ungainly outcasts of the bag world, with an impoverished lexicon. Outside the pages of Grazia, does any normal person actually say 'tote' or 'shopper'? This is the bag whose size prompted the silliest piece of fashion advice I have ever read: carry a big bag and your bum will look smaller. Now, I am as gullible as the next woman when it comes to quick-fix slimming solutions, but really. Have you ever mused on how slim Santa's bottom looks in relation to his big red sack? No, thought not.

2000 Dior Saddle

Mention 'hardware' and you'd be forgiven for conjuring an image of men in brown coats selling nails by the ounce. But the Saddle bag changed all that. Now hardware was all about seriously weighty bag embellishment - flashy buckles and rivets and sexy shiny stuff. Some versions of Dior's Saddle flaunted more horse paraphernalia than a Chingford theme pub, and women loved it. With its unique equestrian styling, it appealed to the pony-mad gymkhana-entrant in us all. A rosette declaring fourth place in the mane-plaiting discipline would have finished it off nicely. With the Saddle, John Galliano brought novelty and whimsy to mass-market bag design - no small achievement in the stiff, po-faced world of leather goods.

2001 Balenciaga Lariat

Hard to believe now, but the Lariat was slow to sell when it first launched. Then the highly successful 'seeding' technique was used. Thirty of the bags were sent to fashion's most influential names, and it duly appeared hooked over the bankable shoulders of Kate Moss and Sienna Miller. The bag, inspired by fringed leather biker paraphernalia, became wildly desirable, and another it-bag was born. Ordinarily sensible women who, under normal circumstances, couldn't give a monkey's about this or that vacuous celebrity, suddenly turned all silly when there was a nice bag involved. The madness shows little sign of abating.

For a bag to be pictured on a celebrity arm is priceless PR, but it has to be the right calibre of arm. Keira Knightley is rumoured to receive 20 bags a week, which leads people like you and me to ponder this gross injustice: why do women with the least stuff to lug around own the most bags? I am guessing that Victoria Beckham, who owns a roomy Hermès Birkin in every colour, does not count among her daily haul a stash of balled-up tissues, any number of dog-eared Tesco Computers for Schools vouchers and a few Playmobil heads. This is possibly why she gets sent free bags and we don't.

2002 Luella Gisele

This bag established the trend for ensuring exclusivity and heightening the buzz by giving bags their own names. Not plebby names like Tracy and Pat, but aspirational or iconic names. The Tod's Lady Di tote and Gucci's Jackie bag were earlier forerunners. The Gisele, named after the model Gisele Bündchen, is festooned with more fancy bridlery than a prancing show pony. Fabulous to look at but - and I speak as an owner here - a pig to use. Takes an age to get in and out of. People in Post Office queues hate you. Still, when has practicality ever been the key selling point of an it-bag? Women want it-bags for lots of different reasons, very few of them to do with having enough room to stash a spare nappy and a Thermos. Women want fashionable bags because they impart status, because they can render a boring outfit instantly fabulous and because they allow entry-level access to a designer name whose clothes they might never be able to afford. When guilt strikes at the £500-plus price tag, women can comfort themselves with this thought: bags are democratic and inclusive. They transcend tricky divisions to do with weight, age and social status. In short, bags are not just for skinny bitches. There is no such thing as a size-zero bag.

2003 Louis Vuitton Monogram Multicolore

Following the spring show that featured the Murakami-designed bags, the customer-services lines at Louis Vuitton were jammed with orders. The first shipments never hit the sales floor - they were all pre-sold. There is a school of thought that says Louis Vuitton's creative director, Marc Jacobs - who brought the Japanese artist Takashi Murakami on board for this project - is little short of God where bags are concerned; am I allowed to say that, in the case of the Multicolore, this was God having an off-day? But who cares what I think, because the Multicolore sold by the shedload and was, of course, widely copied. Spare a thought here for Louis' son Georges Vuitton, who in 1896 created the intricate LV logo with the express intention of preventing counterfeiting. He failed abysmally. Vuitton is the most knocked-off brand in fashion history. Despite its garish 33-colour logo design, the Multicolore was a model of good taste next to a later Vuitton offering, the Tribute Patchwork, which sold at £23,484 - nearly £3,000 more than a Mercedes C180 Coupé. Why so much? It was made from cut-up bits of 15 Louis Vuitton bags and incorporated rare feathers and alligator skins. Ah, LV, we love you more when you're discreet.

2004 Mulberry Roxanne

Known to devotees as the Roxy, this baby ticked all the right it-bag boxes. It had pockets, buckles and more studs than a porn shoot at the Hefner mansion. It cost £595, but in a sea of silly bags it was seen as the epitome of grown-up practicality. Not for the first time retailers used engineered scarcity to create waiting-list hysteria in order to elevate a bag's covetability. Mulberry states that leather goods now account for more than 80 per cent of its profits, and the same goes for most labels. Bags are much easier to sell than clothes, the profit margins are huge and manufacturers don't have to bother with the tedious issue of sizing. Women have fallen hook, line and sinker for the notion that it is vital to acquire a 'wardrobe' of bags for all occasions. You may be clothed head to toe in Primark, but you'll still cut it as fashion-savvy dresser if you're shouldering the right bag.

2005 Chloé Paddington

Keep up, anyone who thought Paddington was still about stations and bears in duffle coats. When Net-a-Porter went live with its first stash of Paddington bags, it sold 376 of them in 36 hours. This is the bag that took the trend for ostentatious hardware to a whole new level, as anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of a blow to the head from a wayward padlock will attest. The Paddington exemplified the girly clubbiness that comes with bag ownership. A bag speaks volumes about its owner's personality, much as your choice of comic/ popstar did when you were ten. Bags have become like grown-up girl-toys, a few stages on from Barbies and Polly Pockets. Their owners regard them more as cuddly playthings than practical receptacles. What woman hasn't whiled away the odd half hour toying idly with her beloved bag's many clasps and pockets, inhaling deeply of its leathery innards and marvelling at the sound of its satisfying clunks and snaps? Or perhaps that's just me.