Luggage

I joined a Board of an international bank a few years back. I hadn't been on a board of anything as posh as a bank before - just a few scuzzy charities, some student movements etc. But I figured a bank was the real deal and I had better dress the part. I fished out some smart grey clothes, and shopped for some restrained Mac eyeshadow pots. I put it all together with my smartly bound papers and briefing notes and looked around for an appropriately businesslike receptacle to put it in.  I searched through my cupboards and the spare room and the loft. All I could find was a battered backpack, a pair of huge family suitcases and an old shabby leather thing so preposterous it defied description (and, for clarification, definitely not something I brought into the relationship).  Eventually I decided that since the meeting I was attending at this bank was only for a day, then some over the shoulder holdall thing would do, I would shove it under the table and nobody would see it. The next day I pitched up at City airport, beautifully dressed in a smart two piece suit, my IPad and briefing papers in my green Kate Spade bag, and then slung over it was a filthy once-cream coloured Shanghai Tang beach bag, purple on the inside, containing 24 hours worth of beauty products, PJs and change of clothing. They won't see, they won't see, I told myself everytime I glimped this horror hanging over my shoulder. I walked into the boardroom of the bank and stopped short. Every other person there had an immaculate mini wheelie. Mini wheelies. I never even knew such a thing existed. It immediately became clear to me that Luggage Maketh the Man (not to mention the Woman). Particularly once it became clear we were all going to be put up for the night at an impossibly staid, high end hotel, complete with marble and appalling piano playing at the brass-laden bar. This was a hotel where the women wore mink furs and had Russian accents. Positively nobody checked out with their belongings scrunched into a scruffy beach bag. I spent most of my overnighter in a hot blush. It was the first time in my life that the quality of my luggage meant anything to me. How had this happened? It was truly incredible that stepping up to a new institutional environment made something as otherwise innocuous as luggage become a career defining issue. Suffice to say that the minute I was off the plane I headed for the nearest luggage shop and got me a black, swish, mini wheelie. After which I had no problem feeling right at home in the overheated board room with its high tech individual powerpoint screens and its high end biscuits. Luggage.maketh the capitalist.