Twelve second-hand bags for the price of one new one.

The claim is simple: you can buy into a trend second-hand without overpaying for it. I say some version of this most weeks. I'd never actually done it properly, on camera, with my own money and the receipts out.

I've also pledged not to buy new. So the AW26 bags themselves were never on the table. I used them as clues instead.

Fashion houses go back to their archives because it's safer. A brand-new shape is expensive and risky; a shape people already loved has, in effect, been tested once. If the houses are searching backwards, the original version is often still sitting on Vinted, badly photographed and listed as "brown leather handbag".

So before I'd chosen a single bag, I looked at where handbag design was heading for autumn, went back through roughly twenty years of designer archives, and narrowed it down to five searches. The fifth one I kept quiet until the end.

Then came the hard part: finding bags good enough to fill those five spaces, in the right condition, at prices I was actually willing to pay, without abandoning my own buying rules.