Women may buy designer bags to protect their relationships, study suggests

Could women's penchants for designer handbags and shoes actually be a signal for other women to stay away from their significant other?


A new study currently in press for the February 2014 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research suggests that women may use designer goods to tell other females that their significant other is dedicated to them.


"It might seem irrational that each year Americans spend over $250 billion on women's luxury products with an average woman acquiring three new handbags a year, but conspicuous consumption is actually smart for women who want to protect their relationship," study co-author Vladas Griskevicius, an associate professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, said in a press release. "When a woman is flaunting designer products, it says to other women 'back off my man.'"


To reach that conclusion, researchers conducted five experiments with 649 women of varying ages.


First, the women were given a scenario of seeing a woman at a party with her date. Then they were asked what they thought about that woman's relationship solely based on the quality of her belongings.


The researchers discovered that women were more likely to think that owners of luxury items were in a devoted relationship, and they were less willing to flirt with the owner's significant other. It didn't even matter to them who had paid for the items: The subjects believed that no matter what, the man had something to do with the luxury purchases.


In another experiment, researchers asked the subjects in relationships to picture that another woman was flirting with their man, in order to make them jealous. Then, in a seemingly unrelated task, the women were asked to draw a designer logo. Women who were jealous drew logos twice as large compared to women who were just asked to draw without being provoked.


"The feeling that a relationship is being threatened by another woman automatically triggers women to want to flash Gucci, Chanel, and Fendi to other women," research co-author Yajin Wang, a PhD student at the Carlson School of Management, said in a press release. "A designer handbag or a pair of expensive shoes seems to work like a shield, where wielding a Fendi handbag successfully fends off romantic rivals."


The researchers saw the same behavior when they tried that experiment on single women. To them, this suggested that unattached women may seek out designer brands in order to prevent other women from taking advantage of them when they are in a relationship. In a way, the luxury goods were a signal to stop women from latching onto their future, prospective significant other. The authors added that future research was needed to test this hypothesis.


In one other experiment, they gave participants $5 and told them that they could spend as much as they wanted to buy $1 raffle tickets to win a $200 shopping spree at eight different luxury brand stores including Nordstrom's, Tiffany and Coach.


Then, they tried to make some of the women jealous just like they had done in the previous experiments. Women who felt their relationships were threatened were willing to spend 32 percent more in order for a chance to win the shopping spree. They were also shown to want more expensive handbags, cars, cell phones and shoes.


Previous research by Griskevicius showed that men bought more expensive products in order to show of their wealth and attract mates. Using this study, he believes women buy expensive products to show off to other women, not in order to appeal to men. The author added to the Minneapolis Post that this behavior happens on subconscious level.


"The fact that most women's luxury products are aimed to impress other women helps explain why men have a hard time figuring out if a woman's handbag costs $50 or $5,000," Griskevicius explained. "Women's designer products are geared to show off to other women not men."


He added that women who don't have the desire to flaunt expensive goods may not have as many fears about losing their significant other.


"For women in relationships who are not displaying these fancy handbags and showing off, it suggests that they are more secure in their relationship, that they feel less threatened," Griskeviciu said to the Minneapolis Post.

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America's Most Beautiful People

We searched from coast to coast to find the loveliest celebrity native of each state in the union (plus the District of Columbia!). Click through to find out which Hawaii native has dual citizenship, and which denizen of the Dakotas is a die-hard Steeler’s fan.

Channing Tatum
Cullman, Alabama
The studly model-turned-actor spent a rural childhood in Alabama and Mississippi before going on to star in films like Step Up and G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra.

Right now, Channing Tatum, the hunky star of this month's action epic G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, is starring in his own personal version of The Biggest Loser. For a week, he's been adhering to a strict low-carb meal plan and working out three times a day with an ex–Navy Seal. Today, he's even brought his own lunch, if you can call it that, to a West Hollywood café: one American cheese slice, one small apple, one even smaller bunch of grapes, and, for dessert, four peanuts in a tiny condiment container. To play Duke, the Special Ops hero who battles his nemesis, Cobra, in Joe, the 29-year-old Tatum had to keep his six-pack at attention for an ­entire half-year shoot.
It's hard to tell from his V-neck T-shirt and extra-baggy distressed jeans, but Tatum insists he's packed on 20 pounds. "I love my life entirely too much to worry about it," he says, green eyes twinkling. But when paparazzi caught him running shirtless the other day, it did not go unnoticed. "They said, `He let himself go!' " he explains, incredulous. "I'm like Cheap Jordans on Sale, `I'm a guy! It should never matter that much!' " He tosses back the peanuts like a shot of tequila.
Such is the price he must pay for giving us the opportunity to appreciate his buffed body in pretty much every film he's made, from the teenage Twelfth Night romance, She's the Man with Amanda Bynes, to Kimberly Peirce's Stop-Loss, to last spring's Fighting, in which his rogue street fighter, Shawn MacArthur, suits up for every pummeling in an extra-tight white tank. Google "Channing Tatum" and you'll find plenty of shots from his pre-film modeling career. In campaigns for Dolce & Gabbana, Nautica, and Abercrombie, he perfected his signature look—a shaved head, pillowy pursed lips, and tight, tanned abs showcased in positions that range from silly to impossibly sexy. In one memorable shot, snapped by Bruce Weber, the laces of Tatum's leather pants are suggestively undone, and he's lovingly cradling a rooster to his bulging pecs. "My friends give me shit about that one," he says with a laugh. "They're like, `Really? A cock?' But I don't regret anything. There's a naked picture of me out there somewhere," he says with a shrug. "I just want to get it out there that it was really cold in the room."
G.I. Joe was for Tatum, who grew up staging elaborate battles with the action figures, a "wily" kid's dream. Even though he and Marlon Wayons were nearly asphyxiated by their constricting black suits and airless helmets, "We just laughed our way through it," Tatum says. This was achieved in part by pranking costars Sienna Miller and Rachel Nichols—"a lot of burping, farting," Nichols says. "He filled someone's car with porn." The first time the cast got together for a table read, "Marlon showed me his butt, and, I think, Sienna slapped it," Tatum says. His goofiness seems inversely proportional to his good looks and his success. "He is one of the nicest guys—a guys' guy and a girls' guy," says Joe director Stephen ­Sommers. Equally surprising is Tatum's acute awareness of his place in the Hollywood world order. He is the first to admit that his body, and what he can do with it, was the basis for his career and to a certain extent, still is.
The muscles are a product of his compulsive nature. "Anything I love, I become utterly obsessed with," he says. The Tatum family is based on a farm in Alabama, but his parents, Kay and Glenn (she worked for an airline, he in construction), moved Tatum and older sister Paige to Tampa, Florida, where Tatum discovered Gor Chor kung fu, an especially brutal martial art. In high school, when he got sick of being the tall, white football player on the sidelines, he taught himself to break-dance. Within days, he was doing head spins. He did his first back flip off a chain-link fence on a dare.
He got a football scholarship to Glenville State College in West Virginia but dropped out and found himself ­doing everything from framing houses to working as a mortgage broker. He moved to Miami and was discovered on the street by a model scout, leading him to videos and commercials. By 2001, he was living in New York, taking acting lessons, and three years later he moved to Hollywood. With little more than a few episodes of CSI: Miami on his résumé, he landed the lead in Disney's Step Up, the 2006 dance-based teen romance that earned $114 million. Tatum plays Tyler Gage, a Baltimore punk sentenced to community service at a performing arts school. Soon he's popping and locking alongside an aspiring ballerina played by Jenna Dewan; they've been together ever since. Last fall, he proposed in Maui. Rumor is they'll get hitched this summer.
Around the same time that Tatum landed Step Up, he read the script for A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Dito Monteil's gritty semi-autobiopic about growing up in Queens in the 1980s, co-starring Robert Downey Jr. Tatum found himself crying uncontrollably. He told his agent he needed to play Antonio, the hotheaded punk who bleeds loneliness. "I couldn't have fought harder to keep him out of my movie," says Monteil, who also wrote and directed Fighting. "I said, `This guy's a male model from freakin' Abercrombie.'" But Tatum pursued the part relentlessly. "I'm so glad I lost that argument," Monteil adds.
"You can tell how strong an actor he is by how he'll underplay something," says Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who plays opposite ­Tatum in Joe, worked with him on ­Havoc and on Stop-Loss, and will be one of his ­dozen-plus groomsmen. ("If I have a bromance with you," Tatum says, "that's it.")
When Saints debuted at Sundance in 2006, Tatum's portrayal of Antonio lit up the phones. With his hair dyed black and his boyish shoulders hunched under a sleeveless jean jacket, his freewheeling rage is so menacing that it's hard to watch. Nike Shoes Wholesale The honesty came from experience. "Antonio was my friend growing up," Tatum says. "I was more the Dito. I was the one who walked away from people."
The performance got him nominated for an Independent Spirit Award, and soon, "every time they needed a white guy to say `yo' or `dawg,' they called me," he says with a laugh. He had no interest in coasting on that thug-with-a-heart persona. "I wasn't the best actor, and I'm probably still not. But I work harder than anyone I know."
He spends every free second he has studying performances and scripts and figuring out how he can "get in the room" with directors he admires. His favorite performance to date is his least physical. In Dear John, out this winter and directed by Lasse Hallström and written by The Notebook's Nicholas Sparks, Tatum plays a soldier home on leave who falls for a college student played by Amanda Seyfried.
"I'm just starting to wrap my head around how to become a real character," he says. "I used to think you always had to be doing something, literally moving, to stay interesting. I'm working on stillness."

Lollapalooza 2013: An Intimate Chat with MS MR

Yesterday afternoon we got in bed with MS MR. Literally. Before the indie-pop duo's set at Chicago's chichi residency, EnV, for a rooftop soirée hosted by Gilt City, Lizzy Plapinger and Max Hershenow invited us to do their interview in the fluffy bed they had slept in the night before. We obliged.

It was a day before the NYC-based group would be performing at the Lollapalooza festival, and the intimate crowd of pool partiers were ready to watch Plapinger's mesmerizing, rainbow hair-thrashing performance. Hershenow accompanied her on piano and backup vocals. The Vassar College alums released their first EP in September 2012 and have since been touring Europe and the U.S to promote their songs (such as "Hurricane"). Their performance had the elegance of Florence + the Machine with an Ellie Goulding edge. (Plapinger, too, has a signature raspy voice).

Read on to learn how this pair initially got together, why they, too, sweat Beyoncé, and which hair hue Plapinger hopes to try next.

You guys met in college. How has your relationship changed and evolved?

Max: I mean, how hasn't it?
 Lizzy: We went to school together, and we knew each other. We had taken classes together but we weren't very close, we didn't have the same friends. So it wasn't really until after school. We pretty much went from complete strangers to spending every second of the day together. It literally could not have changed any more.

How did you get to this point?

Max: I was producing on the side while going to dance school after graduating from college. We both moved to New York. Lizzie was running her label, Neon Gold. I was interested in producing and sent her and email looking for any artists and she responded with a song she was working on attached. We got together and, magically, it happened really fast. We didn't need to talk about what we were doing, and we didn't talk about it until we started writing the music.

What does performing Cheap Jordans On Sale at Lollapalooza mean to you guys?

Lizzy: We've been in Europe most of the summer doing a headline tour and some festivals over there, so performing at the festivals in the States is a huge milestone for us. We did Governors Ball, are doing Lollapalooza, and then we will be at Outside Lands next weekend. We really picked things that mean a lot to us and make a statement about our ambitions and aspirations. Lollapalooza feels like that. I hope it is a big come out weekend for us.

You are also playing at this intimate party today. How does the size of the venue change your performance?

Max: We try not to change. So much of performing is feeding off of the audience and just feeling it out. Our favorite shows have been both the enormous ones, where we have 10,000 people, and the really tiny basement rooms that are dirty and sweaty.
 Lizzy: You can never really bank on what the audience is going to be like, so the most you can do is have fun with it and make the most of it for yourself. Any situation where we have done that and had a good time, it became infectious and the audience fed off of it.

You guys have great style. What inspires your look?

Lizzy: It's sort of fleeting. It's a little bit grudge, a little but '90s oriented. I hope there is a New York City effortlessness. We are very into our collage aesthetic in all formats and that translates into our fashion sense.
 Max: I take a lot of inspiration from Lizzie's hair. Six months ago I hated orange and would never wear it. Then Lizzie died her hair, and I was like, "Uh, that's orange." I warmed up to it, and now half my wardrobe is orange.

Where do you shop?

Lizzy: In general we wear a lot of vintage and a lot of street brands. We firmly believe that you don't have to spend a lot of money to express your style, look good, and feel comfortable.
 Max: We love ASOS, H&M, and Topshop.
 Lizzy: Vintage for us has become this fun, new activity. Every time we go to a new city we look at which vintage stores we should go to. We are collecting a list.
 Max: It's cool to wear clothes and be like, "Oh my boots are from that one place we went to in Paris, and my jacket is from Portland." You feel like you have a catalogue of every place you've been that you get to wear.

Are there any hair colors you won't try?

Lizzy: I was positive I would never go green. I thought it was revolting and hated when other girls did it. I thought it looked so trashy, but lately I have this burring desire to go neon lime, highlighter green. Now, I feel the same way Max did with orange: No color is totally off the table China Wholesale En Bag.

You toured with Marina and the Diamonds. What was that like?

Max: She took us out on our very first tour ever, so we will always be eternally grateful to her. She is a really dear friend and one of our very first supporters. When she put her stamp of approval on the project, it really gave us the kickstart. Her fans have continued to be some of our strongest supporters.

Who would be your dream collaborator?

Lizzy and Max: Beyoncé.
 Lizzy: Basically there is isn't a day that goes by that we don't talk about Beyoncé.
 Max: We are pretty obsessed with her.
 Lizzy: We have very alternative, DIY taste, and Beyoncé is always the Brooklyn girl in our minds.

What is it about her? Kim Schifino of Matt & Kim is also a mega fan.

Lizzy: Where do you start? I am fascinated by how she has risen to where she is, her ambition, her drive, and how she expanded herself as an artist and as a brand. At the heart of it, she is truly talented but she is also an incredibly smart business woman.
 Max: She is the biggest pop star in the world. She could just be making really solid, safe, Top 40 music, but she is really doing weird stuff that other people aren't doing. That's awesome. And then she performs on stage and looks amazing.

Your songs have been on 'Pretty Little Liars,' 'Grey's Anatomy,' and 'Game of Thrones.' Do you watch those shows?

Max: Some of them. We are always interested to see how our music is used. We are selective about how it is placed but we are pretty open and say yes to most things, especially the TV shows. "Bones" has been used in three different shows. We are really interested to see how it works in totally different situations and how different people interpret it.

Let's talk about your sound. How would you guys describe it?

Lizzy: We say at our heart we are pop artists. We love Beyoncé and for us it is really liberating, because pop can mean anything. These are the first songs we have ever written so a lot of MS MR, and this writing process, is just experimenting. I hope that leaves the door open for us to dabble in anything and everything.
 Max: We want to bring in other genres and other weird sounds and continue to feel really creative, but we also want to make music that people want to hear.

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For Fall 2013, Camouflage is More Visible Than Ever

It’s taken me longer than many to come around to the idea of camouflage as a viable accessories trend. Like I mentioned when we took a closer look at 3.1 Phillip Lim’s camo bags (which I, admittedly, kind of liked), it’s a print that I’ve prided myself on hating for years on end, and I didn’t see that changing anytime soon. Then a pretty little greyscaled Prada tote came along, and that was all it took to flip me. Now camo is definitely on my fall shopping list, and it should be on yours too.

I’m not going to sit here and extoll the virtues of camo in general, mostly because you guys already know that my feelings are mixed. When it’s done properly, though, LV Bags Cheap Wholesale and when it’s done on a piece that really pokes at that soft spot in your skull, you’ll know it. This season offers your best chance to find that piece, whether it’s a bag, a scarf or a pair of shoes – heavyweight designers like Valentino and Manolo Blahnik have added the iconic print to their fall repertoire. Below, we’ve rounded up a bunch of pieces at different price points for your shopping pleasure.

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