After debating the most impactful women’s and men’s fashion since World War II as part of our T 25 series, we decided to ask five members of the American fashion community to each nominate 10 accessories they felt were worthy of being on a list of the 25 most influential shoes and handbags of the past 100 years. Our group of panelists spanned over four decades of experience in the industry and included the stylist and T contributing editor Ian Bradley; the author and former creative director of Barneys New York Simon Doonan; the creative director and founder of the accessories label Brother Vellies, Aurora James; the senior vice president for creative merchandising of Nordstrom, Olivia Kim; and the founder and designer of the fashion brand Luar, Raul Lopez.
On a cold evening last December, the jury convened on a video call — which ended up lasting two-and-a-half hours — to wrangle over the 50 shoes and handbags they’d put forth. Some nominations were rejected, either because the group felt a piece hadn’t substantially informed what came after it or because it didn’t meet the list’s two criteria: the accessory must have been designed after 1925 and sold in stores. That latter rule disqualified Alexander McQueen’s nearly 12-inch-high Armadillo platform heels; although they challenged the standards of shoe shape and height at the time (some models reportedly refused to wear them on the runway in 2009, for fear of injury), they were never available to the public. Other propositions were met with unanimous approval, such as Fendi’s 1997 Baguette bag. The 2001 Le City bag and a pair of 2007 “Lego” heels from Nicolas Ghesquière’s 15-year tenure at Balenciaga took two spots, making him the only designer with multiple items on the list.
The 25 selected pieces, which appear not ranked by their importance but in the rough order they were discussed, come from almost every decade since the 1930s (excepting the 1940s and 2020s). Discussed with particular enthusiasm were the picks from the 1990s and early aughts, which made sense, the group concluded: the ’90s were when the idea of the It bag was born, ushering in an era in which status-symbol accessories would permeate pop culture, with Real Housewives and Kardashians wearing Louboutins and carrying Hermès Birkins on TV.
But though we still live in that age, the hysteria around shoes and handbags may have peaked in a 2000 episode of the HBO series “Sex and the City,” in which Sarah Jessica Parker’s character, Carrie Bradshaw, wearing a pair of towering heels and a purple sequin-encrusted Fendi purse, is mugged at gunpoint. When told to hand over her “bag,” she corrects the thief: “It’s a Baguette.” — Alexa Brazilian