Unable to stop a spear but singularly effective at getting people to stop and stare, metal mesh handbags were all the rage at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The discovery that metal, unlike skin, is not easy to cut with a sword launched a millennia-long exploration into how to make heavy, notoriously not-flexible metal into something we could wear. In the second millennium BC this effort led to the invention of scale armor—wherein many small metal plates are attached to a flexible backing, the only downsides being that it wasn’t nearly as flexible as fighters engaged in mortal combat would have wanted, and that it could get a bit heavy. It is widely believed that during the Iron Age some clever Celt came up with the idea of making a bunch of metal rings, linking them all together, and forming an extremely fluid piece of armor strong enough to stop a cutting blow. Chain mail armor was de rigueur among knights and lords for centuries thereafter, and woven, protective metal garments continue to see use to this day in cut-resistant gloves for butchers, woodworkers, and oyster shuckers, and in shark-resistant wetsuits. But in the twentieth century woven metal began to appear most prominently not in personal protective equipment but in the realm of fashion.
After seeing a good friend’s collection in the Hudson River valley, we became intrigued by the subject of twentieth-century metal mesh purses. When it comes to these fine, delicate, and decorative objects, Whiting and Davis is the name to know. Founded as a jewelry concern in 1876, the company’s first mesh handbag was designed by Charles A. Whiting in 1892. Whiting had been hired by the company as an office boy for a modest nine cents an hour, but swiftly rose to become a designer, before being made partner in 1896. The early bag was, as Whiting recalled in his memoir, “crude and costly.” It could not have been otherwise. At that time, the mesh assembly process was intensely laborious. Ring mesh was linked by hand, and much of the piecework was farmed out to low-wage craftsmen. The process was tedious and time-consuming—in fact, little changed from what had gone into making chain mail one thousand years earlier. It was utterly unscalable, but all of this would soon change.
On March 10, 1909, Alonzo Comstock Pratt filed a patent for a “Machine for Making Link Mesh.” Whiting and Davis saw the tremendous potential in Pratt’s design, bought it, then set Pratt to work, leading to two subsequent patents for improved machines. Before mechanizing, the firm was working day and night and was still barely able to fill a fraction of the orders that were pouring in. With Pratt’s machines up and running, Whiting and Davis was able to scale up production while imposing uniform standards in quality of work. Whiting later reported that the machines the company developed could “make mesh at the rate of seven hundred rings a minute, and complete links into mesh at the rate of four hundred thousand a day.” This daily output Whiting compared favorably to that of craftsmen from the early Norman period (1066–1154), who could produce the rings necessary to make a coat of chain mail, about a quarter of a million, in about three years. Not only could Whiting produce in a day what took his medieval ancestors three years to make, but, as he noted, “every ring [of Whiting’s manufacture] would be perfect.”
Hitting the market in about 1892, Whiting and Davis mesh bags exploded in popularity. The firm’s success soon inspired imitators. The most successful domestic competitor was the Mandalian Manufacturing Company, owned by Sahatiel Garabed Mandalian (1869–1949), who emigrated from Turkey to the United States in 1898. By 1906 he had teamed up with a number of creative businessmen in North Attleboro, Massachusetts, to found Mandalian and Hawkins. The company was another early adopter of mechanization for mesh-making—using an invention by George Gos patented in 1912—and, in some ways, Mandalian products would prove superior to those of Whiting and Davis, particularly with regard to the hinges and joints of the moving elements in bags. Mandalian’s designs often called for soldered connections where articulated arms moved to open or close the bag, while Whiting and Davis used hinges, which tended to break. Mandalian and Whiting and Davis competed against each other for many years before the latter finally bought the former out in 1944. Acquisition came to be a hallmark of Whiting and Davis’s strategy for maintaining market dominance. Indeed, after Dresden and Weiss, a German manufacturer, developed a method for manufacturing an extremely fine ring mesh based on Whiting and Davis’s patented machines, the two companies engaged in a legal tussle that eventually saw all of Dresden’s machinery acquired by Whiting and Davis. With the foreign maker’s techniques for producing the very fine “Dresden” mesh brought under the company’s umbrella, the Dresden Mesh line was introduced by Whiting and Davis in 1918.
Whiting and Davis’s use of enamel to add further decoration and collectability was one of the triumphs for the company, and brought a spectacular sense of luminance just in time for the 1920s. The company also sought to capitalize on the public’s interest in pop culture events, as when Princess Mary of England married in 1922 and Whiting and Davis introduced the Princess Mary bag, characterized by a flap closure, which became immensely popular.
Whiting and Davis bags were always considered high-end luxuries. In 1923 the sterling-silver Delysia compact bag sold for $60, equivalent in purchasing power to $1,107.39 today, a staggering sum for that sort of item. One gets the feeling that these products benefitted from an early form of brand recognition not unlike that which surrounds Apple products today, with loyal customers willing to pay many times what they would for a competitor’s product.
Whiting and Davis worked to establish this loyal following through canny advertising efforts and the generosity of the firm’s service department. For many years Whiting and Davis offered to restore to its original state any product of theirs that had been damaged or had become worn out, for no charge or a nominal fee. They offered the same service for mesh bags made by other domestic manufacturers (although for substantial sums). Many women’s fashion publications, like Ladies’ Home Journal, would encourage their readers to purchase only Whiting and Davis products, due in part to this guarantee of maintenance over the long term.
Such services were considered a significant inducement because the product itself, while beautiful, was not particularly rugged. Chain mail could hold up in battle, but a mesh bag would snag in a bar fight. A purse made from metal mesh will bend, twist, or get kinked when too much weight or pressure is applied, especially as emphasis was put on making the mesh as fine, the rings as small, as possible.
Antique Whiting and Davis bags enjoy a bustling collectors’ market, as both fashionable objects and representatives of early mechanized production. Rare or limited pieces sell for thousands of dollars, while more common ones in good condition sell for hundreds. Damaged or altered pieces can be found at a bargain if one knows where to look—often vintage clothing dealers—but repairs are tough to do oneself and restoring a thrift-shop find to its original glory can be a costly undertaking. Caveat emptor is the rule of the day, but because of the care with which they were produced, and the care that many of their owners took with them, one does still hear stories of immaculate pieces discovered in the odd old trunk.
