Judith Leiber’s New Designs Are Turning Up on Tables
Judith Leiber built her career and fortune on exquisitely crafted purses.
By day, legions of well-dressed, well-heeled ladies who lunch, marry and divorce advantageously or make their own way in the world, thank you, toted her satchels and clutches of ostrich, lizard, snake, alligator and calfskin.
As night fell, the same fashion avatars brought out their Leiber minaudieres--those too-tiny confections shaped, among other things, like animals, vegetables, fruit and flowers--paved with thousands of dazzling crystals and bearing four-figure price tags.
Locked in glass cases at such high-end emporia as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman-Marcus, where they were treated like fine jewelry by sellers and buyers alike, the precious purses acquired cult status.
Today, nine years after selling her company and her name and agreeing not to make competing bags, belts and jewelry, Leiber is back in business, lavishing her love of design and detail on a collection of stylish, expensive silver tabletop accessories.
Consider the sterling obelisk perched atop a quartet of turtles on an onyx base--$2,200 for the 11-inch model, $2,870 for the 14-incher--and the matching obelisk salt and peppers ($675 per pair); or the statuette of a gentleman ($2,750) whose onyx base replicates that of companion candlesticks ($1,450 each).
The collection is called Objets Ditty Peto, a brand that marries her girlhood nickname and maiden name. The 25-piece line should hit the market this fall in several tony boutiques, retailing from $140 for a single napkin ring to $4,040 for a woven basket.
Leiber, 80, is aware of the perils of starting a luxury venture in the midst of a recession. “It is a tough period right now; everybody is very hesitant about a lot of things,” she said during a recent chat in her Park Avenue penthouse, furnished with a deft mix of European and Asian antiques and art and numerous paintings by Gus Leiber, her husband and business partner.
It should be noted, however, that her timing has never been overly auspicious. She began her career in her native Budapest during the far-darker days of World War II, and introduced her first line of Judith Leiber handbags just months before President Kennedy’s assassination.
Circumstance drove young Ditty--a diminutive of Judith--to start making purses more than 60 years ago, when Hitler’s march across Europe crushed the family plan that she study chemistry at King’s College London, with an eye to making cosmetics.
Trapped in Budapest without a trade, she applied to the handbag guild and was the first woman accepted as an apprentice. By war’s end (her Jewish family survived on forged papers), she was skilled in every phase of production, from making glue to sewing delicate hides to frames.
After the armistice, she started selling her wares at the U.S. legation because “no one else could afford my bags.” She also met and married Gus Leiber, a Brooklyn-born G.I. stationed in Hungary, and sailed with him to America in 1946. There followed a series of jobs in progressively finer Manhattan handbag factories.
In 1963, the Leibers started their own company in a tiny loft near the Empire State Building. She oversaw the creative side; he ran the business while continuing to paint and teach art. It was, she has said, “a classic case of American entrepreneurship: husband and wife in a start-up, very-low-capital situation during a downturn in business when Kennedy was assassinated.”
But they managed to hang on, selling mostly leather bags to top department stores. In 1967, she produced her first gold-plated evening purse.
“I felt badly that a fashionable woman had to go to her safe to get her genuine gold evening bag for a party,” she recalled last year, after receiving the Accessory Council’s hall of fame award. When the plating process proved defective, she covered the flaws with paste-on crystals, creating an instant success.
For nearly three decades, the business thrived. Leiber bags, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 designs, have been carried and, in some cases collected or even curated, by fashionistas and first ladies alike (Hillary Rodham Clinton owns a Socks cat version.)
Then, she sold Judith Leiber Inc. to a luxury-timepiece conglomerate. “I sold the business in 1993 and worked with them for five years.” When she grew bored-- “‘You can’t just sit around on your heinie,’ I told my husband”--she decided to switch to sterling tableware. “I just got it all together. I had worked in brass because we did mostly handbags in metal.”
The shift was easier for the well-connected Leiber than for a novice: Though she lacked formal art training, she retained ties to artisans who could translate her ideas.
“I make rough sketches. Then I have a fellow who makes a perfect sketch and makes the wax model. He is in New York. He used to make my brass pieces. Basically, it’s a similar feeling, doing an object.”
The models were sent to Florence, where silversmiths made prototypes and shipped them back to Leiber. She sought some changes, including hollowing out a solid, kneeling ram because it was too heavy. Its hinged lid makes it the perfect container for sugar or potpourri, she suggested.
Animals represent about 40% of this collection, which will not surprise devotees of Leiber’s handbag menagerie: pandas and teddy bears (same metal shape, different beading), horses and zebras (ditto), mice, pigs, fish, frogs, cats and rabbits.
The silver creatures include kittens, bunnies, snakes, snails, ducks, frogs and turtles.
“They are quite different from those I used to make,” she said emphatically; the lids on the new breeds, for example, flip up like box tops, while the purses opened like clamshells.
Leiber is hoping her “very big following”--that presumably recession-proof stratum of consumers who think nothing of dropping $2,500 or $3,000 on one of her purses--will spend just as freely on her silver line. These women (and the occasional man) “understand something that is elegant, nice, pricey and classy.”
Certainly David Levy, director of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, appreciates her aesthetic. Come October, he is staging a retrospective of Leiber bags, along with several sterling objects. (Those who believe that when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping can purchase select silver pieces in the gift shop.)
He is clear about why he is showcasing Leiber’s work. “She emerged as a very special kind of designer and artist in an industry that is kind of ho-hum,” said Levy, a fervent champion of design. “Whether we are talking about architecture, chairs, fashion or teapots, you can’t open your eyes in the morning and not deal with design.”
Fashion, he continued, happens to be “a tremendous preoccupation of all people” yet “the least driven by functionality.” Her bags “are like jewels, little works of art.”
And the silver? “Here she is, 80 years old and off in a new direction, and it’s wonderful,” said Levy. “The truth of the matter is, it really talks about what it means to be an artist. She has made a great deal of money, had a great deal of success. She is starting something new and not trivial, something big. It says, ‘Hey, I’ve got to do this work.’”
