Purses
A status symbol

To me, a purse would have these sort of characteristics:

-It can be opened and closed like a wallet, and can hold very specific items. Particularly: handheld mirrors, any and all makeup products, contact lenses, perfumes and sprays, eyeglasses/spectacles/sunglasses, boxes of business cards. Potentially more/less than that based on feedback.

-It cannot be locked, only closed.

-It can be worn, like an umbrella, and appears when looked at and affects shortdesc accordingly.

-It has a distinct fashion and status value, diverse across various types of purse. As in, there absolutely is the outrageously expensive diamondweave purse for the high powered manager that makes little Juniors leather purse look cheap, and this affects the appearance/shortdesc when worn.

-It can be stolen, but better ones might be sturdier in terms of being ripped off of you.

-It's a slightly effective bludgeon.

-It's a total status statement to have a fancy purse.

Compared to the briefcase situation which lacks a lot of variety and stupid reasons to spend money to dunk on your snobby peers (a major gameplay feature IMO) I think they offer a bit more of an interesting twist with some very specific item-limited utility. Perhaps they may even serve as the sort of fashion object a player tailor of great renown may get to design an example for a fashion brand of at occasional times in the future.

There's no coded purses, messenger bags, backpacks, duffel bags, hobo bags, clutches, satchels, totes, et cetera. Pretty reasonable that players could make those for cosmetic roleplaying purposes devoid of functionality I think.

To 0x1mm' s point, I have seen players simply create tailored items to accomplish this facade in the past, and perhaps that is the best avenue.

One of the problems, imo, which is attached by same line of thinking is if you allow players to make items which suggest they're containers, players are going to want to try to steal/pickpocket/run over you to get with the expectations they could have something inside. But since that's not codedly possible to do for those aesthetic items, it's the same type of expectation problem.

Where that technically can be true also for walltets/briefcases/holsters/rifle bags, etc, as those could be empty, the opposite is true in it's codedly possibly they might not.

Johnny (IIRC, it could've been a different staffer) talked about this a few (or maybe longer than a few years ago) about how by doing this it creates the idea for other players witnessing it that there's items inside and the expectation if you take the one item you're getting the rest of the items.

I agree with reefer that too many wearable containers is a bad idea and I feel it's very much a design choice to only have a select few which have a lot of restrictions, as much as I love the idea, But also creating cosmetic items which showcase themselves as containers but aren't codedly functioning as containers creates the problem Johnny talked about a long time ago.

I have no issues with expanding containers as long as a lot of serious thought is put into it. A purse that is essentially a reskinned briefcase? I don't see the harm. A briefcase, however it's skinned, you can wear? I'd be more concerned.

Also, if we want more coded containers and staff is okay with it, then I think they would need to also be very strict about not allowing any kind of custom made containers. Or a person will never know if a container is real and worth stealing or not. It is important that any player to know if what they see is a real container or not.

End of the day, it's going to be up to staff. Is it worth the intense discussion and consideration needed to expand containers in a balanced way? Are there other aspects of the game they feel are more worth that time and effort?

Still, I think a reasonable version of this that wouldn't take a lot of time and effort would be to just make a couple variations of the briefcase. Functionally identical but with slightly different looks and maybe capacities. Coupled with a hard line ban against any tailored containers.