Rago Auctions

Judith Leiber’s name is synonymous with the Swarovski crystal-encrusted handbags for which she is most famous. Born and raised in Budapest, Hungary, Leiber learned about pattern-making and handbag craftsmanship from a young age and interned at various handbag companies in her native country. In fact, she became the first female member of the Hungarian Handbag Guild prior to fleeing the Nazi occupation with her family. During the war, she met Gus Lieber, an artist and a US Army Signal Corps sergeant serving in Eastern Europe. They married in 1946 and moved to the United States the following year.

After some time in the United States, and at the urging of her husband, Leiber founded her own handbag company in 1963 in midtown Manhattan. Leiber’s ability to design and craft a handbag from start to finish set her apart from the standard in the United States, where bags were made via assembly lines. This allowed her to succeed as a designer and to raise the level of craftsmanship for the American consumer. She began with a handful of employees and focused primarily on green leather handbags, with a shift to rhinestones occurring by mistake: Leiber was tasked with quickly fixing a damaged bag and used rhinestones to do so. Struck by how iconic the rhinestone-studded bag appeared, she began incorporating them into her designs and the rest, as they say, is history.

As Leiber’s reputation grew, designers and suppliers sought her out; her glitzy clutches became fashion staples for First Ladies and celebrities from Hilary Clinton to Jennifer Lopez, and garnered many awards including the Coty American Fashion Critics Award (1973) and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America (1994). Her bags are in permanent collections around the world and a retrospective of her designs was displayed at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in 1994. Leiber passed away in 2018, but her brand continues to thrive over 60 years after its founding with a diverse, quirky, and ever-sparkling array of handbags collected and worn by discerning fashionistas across the globe.