In 1948, she began working for the fashion house Nettie Rosenstein. After the liberation of Budapest, she married Gerson “Gus” Leiber, an American GI, and moved to New York. “I designed handbags in my head to get through the misery,” she said. When the war escalated, she and her Jewish family were forced by the Nazis to live in a cellar of a ghetto, and several of her relatives were killed in concentration camps. At the start of World War II, she was working at the Pessl handbag company in Budapest where she quickly climbed the ranks to become a master craftswoman. The dazzling bag was a huge success and would become her trademark.īorn Judith Peto in Budapest, Leiber overcame many hardships before her breakthrough. She had the ingenious idea of applying crystal rhinestones to the base to cover up the flaws. But when the samples came in, Leiber saw that the bottom of the bag looked greenish and discolored as a result of the plating process. The piece in question was named the Chatelaine, and the design was a graceful drop-shaped purse in gold-tinted metal. In 1967, she began working on her first metal handbag. Like many pathbreaking inventions in the history of design, Leiber’s minaudières were the result of a happy accident. These dazzling objets d’art have been regularly seen in the hands of First Ladies, movie stars on the red carpet and even in the prestigious collections of institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Hungarian-born designer made minaudières (small, decorative handbags, often without handles or a strap) in the form of crystal-covered swans, cupcakes, lipstick, wads of cash, teddy bears and other delightful objects.
When it comes to handbags, no designer can compete with Judith Leiber’s (1921–2018) ability to create magic using opulent crystals and wildly imaginative and playful shapes.
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