Women’s designer handbags (favourite bumper sticker: “My other bag’s even bigger!”) – they’re just so reasonably priced, aren’t they? Now tell me: have you moved straight on to this sentence? Then my guess is that you’re a man. Just wait to one side, will you? I’ll be with you in just a minute.

Have you just spat out your breakfast coffee so that you can free up your mouth to scream: “Is this writer on crack?” Then chances are that you are a woman.

OK, men. Have you any idea what big-name designer handbags cost? And how many of them women collect? According to a book by Dana Thomas (published this month), Deluxe: How Luxury Lost its Lustre, women buy on average four handbags a year. Some cost several hundred pounds. Hermès bags can go for several thousand. Assuming that not all of these women are hedge-fund tycoons or wives of Donald Trump, you’d have to guess that many of these bags are being bought by women who have to stint on buying brand-name baked beans to afford a new bag.

Handbags are priced as if they have diamonds sewn into the lining, so that if the Nazis ever return, women can just grab their bag, rip open the lining and trade the diamonds for a berth on a merchant ship headed for Sweden. The cost seems to bear little relation to the cost of the raw materials, which is basically a piece of leather and a zip. Maybe a couple of buckles if you’re getting fancy. The retail price is so wildly divorced from the cost of the raw materials that you wonder how they came to settle on it in the first place. Maybe one day, a long time ago, a ham-fisted shop assistant working on the handbag counter rang up £850 on the till instead of the correct price of £85. When the shopper paid up without a murmur, manufacturers just thought, “Why fight this thing? It’s bigger than all of us”, before calling their printers and ordering amended price tags for their autumn season accessories.

Handbags cost next to nothing to produce. For most luxury brands, says Thomas, “the profit is between ten and 12 times the cost to make the item. At Louis Vuitton, it’s as much as 13 times.” The designer Miuccia Prada tells her: “There is a kind of obsession with bags. It’s so easy to make money. The bag is the miracle of the company.” That’s because buying a new handbag is the easiest way to update your look. Tom Ford, formerly Gucci’s big designer, says: “It’s like you gotta have it or you’ll die.” There are Japanese girls so crazy to get their hands on a Louis Vuitton, Chanel or Hermès bag that they work as prostitutes to rustle up the money to buy one.

But what perplexes men even more than the fact that women’s handbags can cost as much as a small car is what women carry in them. Men? We have a couple of pockets in our jackets: wallet, diary, a pen, mobile phone . . . er, that’s pretty much it. Apart from credit cards and some cash, men’s wallets might have a couple of passport-size photos of their children. Some men don’t even get around to organising that. They still carry around the display pictures that came inside the wallet when they bought it (“Hey, that’s a cute couple of kids you’ve got, mister. But how come they’re not, you know, Korean-looking, like you?”).

Women, by contrast, carry money, their current diary, last year’s diary, unpaid bills, paid bills, receipts dating back to 1993, enough first-aid equipment to perform minor surgery, make-up, 27 photographs, address book, an old address book containing addresses they haven’t got around to transferring into the new address book, drawings that their children made in kindergarten (the children are now 39 and 36), drawings that they themselves made in kindergarten, swatches of sofa fabrics for a sofa they had recovered six years ago, pages torn out of magazines of possible alternative sofas they might buy if they should grow bored with the sofa they had recovered. If their handbag is snatched, the robber has an entire identity-theft kit right there, ready to go. Women walk around as if they might be called upon to produce, on demand, a wall collage representing their entire life (“Excuse me madam, do you have any ID?” “Yes, officer. My passport, marriage licence and Fourth Form school report. Will that do?”). Even though the current fashion is for bags to be as capacious as a sailor’s kitbag, many women now even carry back-up bags to accommodate what they need to see them through the day.

But even if money is not an issue, how to choose which of your many bags (if you’re buying four a year, that’s a couple of dozen you’ve amassed in just a few years) to carry when you leave home in the morning, or head off for an afternoon’s shopping? Women who will choose a summer holiday, or even a new house, in less than three minutes will agonise over the right shoe-handbag combination. Most men find the concept of coordinating their clothes, or their accessories, tricky. That’s why men invented suits. In the days of doublet and hose, men would walk out of their front doors wearing tights that didn’t match any known colour in nature, let alone their doublet, and then become upset when passers-by sniggered. That’s what drove Errol Flynn out of the swashbuckler-movie business; fellow actors on the studio lot pointing and laughing at his mismatched tights. So now men wear suits whose jacket and trousers come ready-matched.

On Monday, times2 featured 15 handbags for the current season, rising in price to £1,220 for the Gucci Aviatrix bag. Monday’s times2 also featured the second instalment of Paul McKenna’s book on how to become rich. Um, become a handbag designer?

A chance for stars to save the Earth

Just when you thought that every opportunity for saving the planet had been exploited – from paying someone to plant trees to offset your flights to Gordon Brown’s recycling of sacked/disaffected Tory MPs by salvaging them from the street and reemploying them as Labour advisers – along comes “Sponsor a Newly Discovered Freaky Animal”. Ten new species discovered by the US-based Conservation International during a survey of Indonesian wildlife are being auctioned in Monaco’s Oceanographic Museum next week in the hope of raising $2 million (£985,000). The star lot, a shark that uses its pectoral fins to stroll along coral reefs, is expected to fetch $500,000 from someone who’s eager to have a living, walking shark named after them.

But why stop there? Couldn’t film stars and singers do their bit by accepting sponsorship, like tennis players do, only with the money they raised being funnelled into worthy conservation work? George “Coca-Cola” Clooney, say; or the Iceland Arctic Monkeys.

But what about Britney? She turned up at the MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas on Sunday clumsily lip-synching to her new single while dressed in a black sequined bikini encasing a once-lithe body that is now about as svelte as a manatee’s. On the plus side, she didn’t get married to anyone just for the weekend; or shave her head; or put her toddler behind a steering wheel. Who might sponsor Britney? A car-crash repairs garage, maybe.

Facial heirs

Doctors now say that they can read the face to detect rare genetic disorders. Aristotle thought much the same, reckoning that people whose noses have thick, bulbous ends are insensitive and swinish. And what about, say, David Gest’s face? Or that of Sylvester Stallone’s mother, Jacqueline: what do they say about their owners? What they say is that they didn’t pay enough to secure the right plastic surgeon.

Times Recommends

• Hysteria alert: Fab One tour starts
• Whodunnits? A cultural religion
• Prison works. So why won't we admit it?