When Carole Gaunt reads at the 86th St Barnes & Noble tonight, she’ll be presented with a gift she’s waited 45 years to get. You see, there’s a brief scene in Gaunt’s memoir, Hungry Hill, where she recalls the summer of ’62, and the Étienne Aigner handbag she wanted to buy with the earnings from her summer job but didn’t. It was just a little bit out of her price range, so she convinced herself she was better off putting the money towards her college education instead. “Was that the right choice?” Gaunt mused when we met for lunch a few weeks back. “I’m still not sure.” (Anyone who’s ever been shopping knows the feeling; for me it was a tuxedo suit.)
When she was researching Hungry Hill, Gaunt called Étienne Aigner for a photo of the handbag, but her query snowballed into something greater. “They had been toying with the idea of bringing out vintage handbags for a while,” she explained, and eventually they brought her into the 34th St. showroom to look through a batch of about fifty to see if she could spot “hers.” It wasn’t there, but it did turn up in a stack of photographs… and, long story short, the company is now reproducing “the Carole bag” in a limited edition, one of which she’ll be receiving tonight.