hidden charms; Time to ditch those purses that jingle and jangle with junk.

Byline: Namehere

With a quick glance, they don't look like much to get excited about: Simple and unadorned, spring's chicest new bags-courtesy of, among others, Bottega Veneta, Jil Sander, and Fendi-are a study in understatement. But watch quietly for a while, and listen very closely, and you'll hear a collective sigh of relief exhaled from coast to coast: The era of the It bags, all novelty and glitz, is being challenged. Stealth wealth (harking back to nineties minimalism, in which functionality and purity of design were the hallmarks of luxury) has returned. And not a moment too soon. "I've felt over the last few years that bag design became like stacking cards," says John Truex, one half of Lambertson Truex. "You put that one last card down, and they all flip over."

Consider the cards flipped. What hasn't been done to purses since the millennium? They have been graffitied, printed, patchworked, raccoon-tailed, feathered-exhausted yet?-embroidered, studded, grommeted, mirrored, and bejeweled. And when designers ran out of things to do to the bag, they simply started to add to the bag trinkets and doodads to trick out whatever was underneath: punk badges, rocker patches, heavy chains, and, most recently, novelty charms in the shape of roses, robots, and romantic hearts.

All of this might have made it exciting to buy a bag several times a year, but therein lay the problem. For every seasonal spendthrift, there was another woman who wouldn't or couldn't invest in something that would be redundant in a matter of months.

And in the search for novelty, it seemed, the bags were getting younger and younger-a trend that reached its apotheosis with all those teen charms. More than a few sophisticated women were revolted at the idea of carrying bags that would make them look like they'd regressed to the age of My Little Pony.

Today, some of the best designers-Roland Mouret, Olivier Theyskens at Rochas, Alber Elbaz at Lanvin-are intent on slowing down the tempo of fashion. Their ...