Curiouser And Curiouser.(BlackBerry bag)

Byline: ROBERT SULLIVAN editor: Sally Singer PHOTOGRAPHED BY RAYMOND MEIER.

The new accessories are a bit weird (jewelry that you can eat?), but they certainly put the fun in function.

Let's talk weird. Not crazy weird but odd weird, as in unique or unusual . You may have noticed weird accessories, or W.A.'s, popping up a lot lately. Maybe you were even wearing the Calvin Klein curling-iron heels when you received one of those little USB flash-drive bracelets that Helmut Lang was sending around as a promo. Of course, accessories are supposed to be quirkythat's why we love them. But lately, weirdness seems a little less weird, making it a good time to ask, Is weird the new normal?

By way of example, we look closely at three new W.A.'s: a BlackBerry bag, a scarf that is also a hood, and a ring made of candy. Each points to what accessories mean to us now, if anything, as well as offering us an insight (from the fashion point of view, anyway) into the state of our lives, or at least our economy, which, at the very least, can be described as weird.

First, the BlackBerry bag, designed as part of the launch collection of a collaborative fashion label called L'Agence, orchestrated by Margaret Maldonado, who is best known as an agent to celebrity stylists. "The line is really just arts and crafts from a person who has been stuck at her desk on the phone for the last ten years," she says. Her W.A. was designed to prevent her BlackBerry from making unauthorized calls while inside her handbag. "I kept calling people from my purse." The BlackBerry bag was also conceived as a tool for contacting her celebrity stylists in the midst of celebrity styling, or what is called "pulling." Maldonado turned to the materials at handin particular, the stuff stylists put on the little electronic microphone-transmitter packs singers wear when performing live, including Swarovski crystals. "Jennifer Lopez or Gwen or Shakira or even the Rolling Stoneswe've done them all," she says. "I don't know how many crystals we've put on their mike packs." Perhaps it succeeds because we live in a postIt bag worldone in which the really expensive It bag is shattered into many smaller, less expensive bagslittle bags in a many-bagged universe. On the other hand, this W.A. also fits a technological requirement, real or perceived: to hold this little thing that we now need, or think we need. Thus, the BlackBerry bag is the opposite of a vestigial appendage that, from an evolutionary point of view, is no longer of use to us. In this way, the BlackBerry bag is a new appendage, the new earlobe.

Margaret Maldonado's W.A. was designed to prevent her BlackBerry from making unauthorized phone calls while inside her handbag. "I kept calling people from my purse"

But there is also an arts-and-craftiness to the BlackBerry bag, a handmade quality that even the highest-priced luxury fashion touches on. This is seen, for instance, in the Tim Burtonesque holiday charm necklace (skulls, ...