Let’s empty our bag. In the literal sense: let’s dump the contents of our handbags and other messenger bags on a table. It is not the future that we will read in this random deposit, like coffee grounds, but the present. A concentrate of time, through the objects that we discover there, but also those that we no longer find there. No more city maps, no more checkbooks, almost no more change, hardly any pens or paper, no more newspapers or lipstick. Instead, wireless headphones, a smartphone, contactless credit cards, hydroalcoholic gel, masks. From this week, a new object could come to complete this very current inventory: the fan.
Monoprix sells them on its site, between a beach mat and a unicorn buoy, at 3.99 euros, in wood and paper. Hema sells them off at 2.25 euros, zebra or flower patterns, in plastic. Same with Shein. Why this reappearance? Just turn on the radio to understand the bet of mass distribution. “An exceptional heat wave”, “up to 39°C in the South” : the heat wave does not even have the elegance to wait until July to overwhelm the French. The Duvelleroy house, fan specialist since 1827, confirms that the tide is turning for these objects long considered obsolete. Eloïse Gilles relaunched the dormant brand in 2010. At the time, “we preached a little in the desert”she says. “We saw our activity change with the first heat waves. We observe today, on our small scale, that our sales are linked to heat waves. »
A story of towns
The art historian Georgina Letourmy-Bordier, fan specialist, confirms a “democratization movement” for a few years. “On Instagram, I follow a lot of fan designers, all over the world. There is such creativity! » Little by little, she says, the object is stripped of the image of preciousness with which it was associated. Image wonderfully embodied by the young Lydia (Sara Forestier), in Dodge (2003), by Abdellatif Kechiche: the teenager from the suburbs, who rehearses for a school project The Games of Love and Chancefrom Marivaux, walks around her city with a period dress dragging in the dust and a fan with holes that she waves frantically under her nose with each reply (“I fan myself”, she says in a splendid neologism). “Have you looked at yourself how you’re doing, with your fan or don’t you know what? »throws an angry playmate at him. “And then, I have the right to do that, it’s me who makes the bourgeois in the story! »
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