The journey through life, as Simone de Beauvoir didn't get round to saying, is all about learning to flow with the rhythmic thud of standards continually crashing all around one. It's not that long ago, for instance, that wearing open-toed sandals with tights was akin to eating in the street: ie, common (as non-common people apparently never say). Now it's edgy. And eating on the street outside the restaurant costs extra. Less than a decade ago, airing one's intimate toned zones was deemed a catastrophic wardrobe malfunction. Now flashing even the flabby bits is an act of proud defiance against the tyranny of global beauty brands that insist on peddling useless cellulite creams. Bra straps on show? Very mid-period Dolce & Gabbana. Scuffed Manolos? Cool British iconoclasm.

Most of this I can just about get an intellectual, if not an emotional, hold on, although the mistreatment of shoe leather will forever trouble me.

Still, we all have our chalk-scraping-on-blackboard moments. For Lynne Truss it is the misapplication of the comma; for Jennifer Aniston it is any name that sounds like Angelina. For me, it is the misappropriation of white handbags, which, far from being a minority accessory confined to Princess Margaret and girls who wear ankle chains and dance round their bags (which, by the way, is an edgy gesture these days) are now everywhere.

It isn't that a white bag is intrinsically unattractive. In the right context ­ a fashion shoot, a shop window, the crook of Liz Hurley's elbow, old photographs of the Queen Mother ­ a white bag possesses a kind of irrefutable rightness. But out here, in what passes for real life, the white bag fails almost every time. Somehow, offset against the average British vignette, that whiteness just doesn't look right. It makes pale skins look pallid, and tanned ones look orange. It should whisper Grace Kelly, the Hamptons. In practice it screams Barbara Windsor, Butlins or, if it comes from Dior, Dubai. In pristine condition it looks campily flashy; distressed it becomes manky. There is no way of nicely ageing a white bag because what you end up with is a faintly sulphuric shade of leather that looks as though something peed and then died on it. And even when new and very, very white, by a strange law of bag physics, it manages not to go with anything.

How this can be is an enigma. Foreigners do white bags without causing grievous visual offence. Is it because their light is more white-bag friendly than ours? Or because they have not only mastered the punishing degree of grooming required to do white bags justice, but suffer no guilty twinges over such self-obsession? Yes to both, I think. And then there's that famous British irony, which cannot simply let unsullied perfection be, but instead feels impelled to build a folly on the side of a classical architectural masterpiece. A white bag is simply a high-maintenance, poker-faced statement too far for most of us. Or was until this summer.

Another rubicon is about to be crossed, because the more you see something, the more immune you become to its inherent wrongness. And now I come to look at them, I quite fancy one of those creamy-white bags with contrasting black or navy stitching myself.

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