Hermès’s Birkin Bag and Gucci’s Horse-Bit Loafer.

15. Hermès’s Birkin Bag, 1984

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/20/t-magazine/most-influential-shoes-bags-fashion-accessories.html

 

The actress Jane Birkin with her namesake Hermès bag in London, 1996.Credit...Mike Daines/Shutterstock

Introduced by Hermès in 1984, the Birkin might be the world’s most in-demand handbag, with an origin story that’s fashion legend. Earlier that year Jean-Louis Dumas, the French luxury house’s executive chairman, was seated next to the actress and singer Jane Birkin on a flight from Paris to London and witnessed her straw basket bag tumble to the floor, its contents scattering everywhere. Birkin complained about how hard it was to find a good, practical weekend bag; the two began exchanging ideas, and her namesake was born. Its briefcase-like design looks simple enough, but it can take Hermès artisans from 15 to 20 hours to hand-stitch each one. And although it was originally priced at $2,000, current styles — which vary in size (from about 8 to just under 16 inches), color (from classic saddle brown to bright orange) and material (from ostrich to alligator) — can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and, famously, there have been waiting lists just for the opportunity to buy one. Last year, a similar bag showed up on the Walmart website for less than $100. Dubbed the “Wirkin,” it sold out in no time. — E.P.

 

Doonan: The Birkin was an exclusive item that not many people knew about until the ’90s, when it became the signifier of glamour. Suddenly, this bag, which was relatively obscure, started showing up on every celebrity and fashion maven who entered every room purse-first.

 

Bradley: Yeah, it used to be, like, an undercover bag — the type a model would get after having a good season. And then it was everywhere.

 

Doonan: It’s interesting to note that prior to this bag’s existence, Jane Birkin carried everything in a rudimentary, rustic basket, which is what girls used to do. Before the handbag revolution, which happened in the ’90s and into the aughts, hip girls used to carry their stuff in a paper bag or shopping bag. A designer bag was [seen as too] conventional.

 

Kim: Its evolution is interesting, too. Jane wore it with all those charms and ribbons on it; that’s how that trend came about. The “purse-first” thing is so funny because women at the time were always carrying such big bags. They preceded you. Now it’s all about how small it can get.

 

7. Gucci’s Horse-Bit Loafer, 1953

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/20/t-magazine/most-influential-shoes-bags-fashion-accessories.html

 

In 1953, weeks after the death of Gucci’s founder, Guccio Gucci, who’d started the company in 1921, three of his sons — Aldo, Vasco and Rodolfo — traveled to Manhattan for the opening of the brand’s first store outside of Italy. While abroad, Aldo noticed the popularity of the penny loafer among American men and decided that Gucci should make its own version. Rather than having a coin slot, Gucci’s leather slip-ons — which were cut, sewn and hammered by hand — featured a horse bit, a motif introduced a few years earlier by Guccio, who had an interest in equestrian style. Francis Ford Coppola wore them while directing the first two “Godfather” movies in the 1970s, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art added them to its permanent collection in the ’80s, and by the ’90s they were so ubiquitous on Wall Street that they were known as “deal sleds.” When Tom Ford took artistic control of the brand in 1994, the loafer underwent a series of makeovers, emerging with a square toe one season and a logo print the next. Future creative directors followed his lead, with Alessandro Michele reinterpreting the shoe for fall 2015 as a shearling-lined slide and Sabato De Sarno, who stepped down earlier this month, adding platform heels to his spring 2024 version. — M.O.

 

 The director Francis Ford Coppola at his American Zoetrope studio in San Francisco, 1970.Credit...Bettmann/Getty Images

Bradley: I’d say that Alessandro’s greatest achievement at Gucci was doing the horse-bit loafer slide. He brought a classic into the modern age by making it a fur-lined slide.

 

Doonan: When Alessandro was working his magic at Gucci, I was in heaven. It was so orgasmic and fabulous. Anything felt possible.

 

Brazilian: But since the shoe was first designed in 1953, I think we should do the original.

 

Doonan: I agree.