Why are they on everything this year? It?s not like they?re actually doing anything. Or maybe that?s OK: Maybe extraneous hardware is the great leveler. Add enough of the stuff, and even bags that cost as much as your mortgage look borderline tacky.

What is it with this rash of grommets? At first I tried to ignore them. I thought they were ugly. I figured they?d go away.

No such luck. Not that I?m that surprised. In case you?ve very kindly forgotten, I also predicted that nobody would buy Miuccia Prada?s clothes.

Far from disappearing, grommets have proliferated, getting bigger and bolder and more numerous, and making the world of accessories safe for all sorts of other extraneous hardware and gratuitous add-ons.

Studs, slots, chains, links, latches, catches, padlocks, turnbuckles, hinges. Pockets, flaps, straps, handles, dangles, tassels, charms. I could go on.

The season?s ?it? bags i.e., handbags by la-di-da designers that cost hundreds if not thousands of dollars and that you have to put your name on a waiting list to be allowed to buy and that are meant to cause passersby to practically fall over with astonishment and envy when they see that you have one are weighed down by pounds of the stuff.

Go clanking around with one of these babies slung over your shoulder, and you?ll know how Marley?s ghost felt dragging his chains. God forbid you should have to sneak into a concert during a whispery passage of some symphony?s first movement.

Mind you, I have nothing against grommets where grommets belong like along the edge of the tarp I park my bicycle under. Hardware, in its place, is one of modern man?s great achievements. How else are you going to connect unlike elements, like a piece of canvas to a brick wall? But the current crop of chichi grommets and links and rings and buckles don?t do much. Lots of them are purely decorative, scattered across the surface of a bag like tin chickenpox. And where they do connect a strap to a bag, or a strap to another strap, they totally overdo it. They couldn?t be less subtle

Ah, but then again, what?s wrong with decoration? Is subtlety always so wonderful?

It took me a while to see that my prejudice against these giant grommets goes back to the dark ages of my youth, when chunky grommets were a feature of the mooshy, marshmallowy pale pink or blue plastic purses you could buy at Gimbel?s basement for $3.99.

A ?good? bag then would of course be made of leather (if not lizard or alligator) and put together almost invisibly. Its hardware would be solid brass (at least) and discreet. Its hinges wouldn?t show. Its clasp would be understated.

Only a cheapie would resort to running its handles through the kind of shiny dime-size base-metal grommets you?d expect to find on an 89-cent clothespin bag. It was like the difference between the kind of sleek, unchromed limo someone like Babe Paley or Jackie Onassis would be ferried around in and the General Lee, the loud orange Confederate-flagged Dodge Charger that was always leaping ravines on ?The Dukes of Hazzard?.

So my first reaction to the recent trend to designer handbags dripping with gratuitous hardware was: Why are designers going to such lengths to make insanely expensive bags look cheap? You?re used to the opposite tack, the $10 watch disguised as a Rolex, the plastic satchel masquerading as a Gucci. But a $1,200 Prada bag that looks like it came from K-Mart? What?s the point?

Actually, the more I think about it, the better I like it. I think it?s kind of wonderful that you can?t tell by looking at least not without looking very close and very carefully which heavily grommeted bag costs $29 and which costs $2,900. It?s so egalitarian. Recent demographic and economic studies have shown that the gap between the richest Americans and the rest of us has been getting bigger and bigger and BIGGER.

The trend to fabulously expensive handbags that look as if they came from a bargain basement seems like a gesture in the direction of evening up the score.

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