Judith Leiber: Fashion designer who escaped the Holocaust and went on to produce handbags for the stars

'I don't consider my work art,' Leiber said. 'I'm an artisan.' Her clients included Greta Garbo, Liz Taylor and the Queen

Leiber with Karl Lagerfeld in 1980: her business grew from nothing to be worth millions (Rex)

Hungarian-born Jewish émigré Judith Leiber survived the horrors of war and the Holocaust to escape to America where she established her brand of handbags for the rich and famous, including first ladies, royalty and Hollywood stars.

She was famed for her crystal minaudieres or clutch (a small, decorative handbags without handles or a strap). These were made of a metal shell, often encrusted with Swarovski crystals, plated with silver or gold, and were crafted in various forms, such as owls, penguins, peacocks, snakes and teddy bears or slices of watermelon, an asparagus and even fireworks or a streetcar. A cupcake shape by Leiber minaudiere featured in the Sex and the City film.

In a career spanning three decades, her whimsical creations, of which she designed over 3,500, sold at exclusive boutiques around the world, becoming collectors’ items often selling for many thousands of dollars. They are frequently displayed as objets d’art in museums around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian and the Victorian & Albert.

Most of her glittering creations were designed to the hold bare minimum. On an evening out “all a woman really needed was a handkerchief, lipstick and a $100 bill – not unreasonable for a Leiber bag owner”. As for anything more, “What’s an escort for?” she said.

Such was her success, she once joked, “At the Met opera house we only counted the bags that weren’t mine.”

Born in Budapest in 1921, into a wealthy family, Judith Marianne (née Peto) was one of two daughters to Emil, a commodities broker with a bank, and Helene. Growing up, Judith and her sister Eva enjoyed looking at the handbags brought back from her father’s trips abroad for their mother.

An accomplished linguist, eventually speaking five languages, Judith was sent to London in 1938 to study chemistry at King’s College after Hungarian leader Regent Miklós Horthy’s regime placed restrictions on Jews entering universities. Her parents were hoping she would become a chemist and repeat the success of a relative who had developed a complexion cream. After her first year, she returned home for the summer, but with the outbreak of war, did not return to London. Hungary was a member of the Axis powers.

With bans on certain jobs, family connections landed her at the prestigious handbag company Pessl, where, after sweeping the floors and making glue, she learned to cut and mould leather, make patterns, and frame and stitch bags into completion. By 1944, she had become the first woman admitted as a master by the Hungarian Handbag Guild. A green toolbox was part of her diploma, holding her essential tools; she carried it always.

In March 1944, Hitler launched Operation Margarethe and Nazi troops entered Hungary in a bid to stave off the advancing Red Army from the East.

Many family relatives living in France had already been sent to Auschwitz, while the Budapest’s Jews were put into a ghetto ready for deportation to the camps. The Petos escaped that fate when they were pressed into service sewing army uniforms and her father was sent to a camp to dig anti-tank ditches. Concurrently, in the little time she had available, Judith started a handbag business using any materials she could find.

Fortunately, a friend who worked at the Swiss consulate procured a Swiss Schutzpass, which put Emil and his family under diplomatic protection and in an apartment with 22 other people. The pass is now in the US Holocaust Museum.

Despite liberation by the Soviets, reprisals, persecution and killings continued and the family moved into a basement with 60 others. The Petos decided to leave for America. However, en route to the embassy, Judith was hit by shrapnel. Luckily, her mother knew a top surgeon still operating from a cellar who managed to save her arm, though she carried the scars.

Leiber in 2008: she and her artist husband of 72 years died within hours of one another (Rex)

With the war now over and the Americans in Budapest too, Judith started selling her bags to the GIs and was able to support the family. She then met Gerson Leiber, an American Army Signal Corps sergeant working at the embassy as a radio operator maintaining contact between Vienna and Budapest. Their first date was to the opera and much to the annoyance of her family, they fell in love and married in 1946, leaving for New York the following year. Her mother rang every day of their honeymoon to ask if she was sure she still wanted to be with him.

They rented a poor apartment in the Bronx. With over 550 handbag manufacturers in New York, Leiber had no problem finding a job, but despite her ability to make an entire leather bag from concept to showroom model, her creativity was stifled with retailers looking to copy European designs, rather than create their own.

Introduced to top fashion designer Nettie Rosenstein, Leiber began as assistant pattern maker in 1948, eventually overseeing the brand’s New York factory as pattern maker, designer and foreman for the last few years of her 12 years there.

In 1953, her break came when Mamie Eisenhower stepped out at the Presidential Inaugural Ball with a matching clutch bag (for her outfit), intricately embroidered with pearls and rhinestones. Over the next decade, her name and reputation grew among celebrities and socialites and, in 1963, her husband convinced her to go it alone.

Raising $12,000, she started in a small office before opening her own factory, in the shadow of the Empire State Building. Though her first season’s green leather bag was a painful education with the wrong colour, which sold badly, the next season’s black alligator skin bag sold out quickly.

Thereafter, she never looked back and made her name with an inspiration born of disappointment. An order of brass minaudière handbags had arrived from Italy tinted an ugly shade of green instead of gold, and so she covered it with crystals and rhinestone, giving the bags an ethereal luminescence. This gave birth to her trademark Chatelaine bag, which sold well and quadrupled revenue. She created five collections a year, in all about 100 designs.

Leiber began to embroider leathers, creating bags using everything from seashells to Japanese silk, most of which glistened with Swarovski crystal dewdrops. One of her favourite bags was a penguin, inspired by a friend who returned from the Arctic; and at one point, Leiber even matched a bag to her husband’s artwork. He was by then a renowned abstract painter.

Designers often sent their gown plans for inaugural balls to be coordinated with her bags and famous customers included Greta Garbo, the Queen, Mary Tyler Moore, Elizabeth Taylor and Joan Rivers; and presidential wives included Hillary Clinton and Barbara Bush. Hoping to improve relations with Russia, Bush gave one to Raisa Gorbachev, the Soviet leader’s wife, who said that it was the most beautiful bag she had owned and that she would leave it to the State Hermitage Museum.

Andy Warhol described her bags as works of art. “Truthfully, I don’t consider them art,” she said. “I’m an artisan.”

In 1993, the business was sold to London’s Time Products for $18m and Leiber retired five years later. The couple sold their Park Avenue penthouse, where they had created a museum dedicated to their work and retired to the Hamptons. She received many industry awards including a Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994 from the Council of Fashion Designers.

After 72-years of marriage, the couple died hours apart. The day before he died, Gerson had purportedly whispered to her as she slept, “Sweetheart, it’s time to leave.”

Judith Leiber, designer, born 11 January 1921, died 28 April 2018