Judith Leiber brings European tradition to New York's handbag elite.

Judith Leiber has turned the handbag into an art form, her solutions eminently practical. Designed to store a lady's necessaries', her rich collections of bags are hand-fashioned in snake, alligator, ostrich, silkskins and silk and adorned with rhinestones and semi-precious stones. Her minaudieres, ornately jewelled handbags often referred to as luminous minisculptures, are gold or silver plated and encrusted with as many as 12,000 brilliantly coloured Australian rhinestones applied individually by hand. Initially added to cover up the imperfections of European plating, the gems give entire bags colour and lustre. Her artistry has often been accused of upstaging the most opulent ball gowns and she is known as the "Couturier of Handbags".

Seated across the table in her expansive showroom, Judith Leiber exudes an air of confidence that one immediately knows is not misplaced. For over 25 years as the creative head and business director of her highly acclaimed accessories firm, she has maintained any unyielding appreciation for the calibre of her eye. "I don't belabour anything. If I find that a concept doesn't work immediately, it's not worth pursuing. There are too many fantastic ideas out there to waste time on one that isn't entirely satisfactory."

Leiber finds inspiration "everywhere - in architecture, in dresses and furniture, paintings," in antiques, exhibitions and her extensive personal library. Her exquisite imagination shapes bags into envelopes and animals, fanciful fruit, silk sacks and figurines.

"All you need in the evening is a lipstick, a hundred dollar bill and a handkerchief, and you're ready to go anywhere," see Lieber. "My bags are mostly practical little boxes, usually with a drop shoulder strap so ladies can gracefully hold a glass and have a snack while balancing their bag," she adds proudly.

Although she has designed for celebrities and First Ladies, Leiber generally designs "for the young women in their 20s and 30s who are very well dressed and very chic, and for the ladies in their 40s and 50s who are a little more sedate and need a little more room - for glasses or perhaps the window's wallet."

Born in Budapest, this 'bag lady' whose private bag now needs to fit a huge New York loft including offices and showroom on one level and workroom below, brings with her the thoroughly personal touch of European tradition. Yet Leiber strayed from her own family tradition of hat-making. As a child she was indulged at the hat factory where the model maker would fashion a little hat for her doll. There she learnt to sew - "I could thread a needle very fast at age three - I don't think that entitles you anything but I guess I had manual skills and enjoyed working with my hands," she says.

Leiber admired her mother's handbags and chose to enter the bag trade because "bags seemed more practical than hats. Every lady needs a handbag whether it is an expensive one or just a feed-bag. Besides hats have been 'off' since before the war," she asserts. After studying to be a chemist in England, Leiber returned to Budapest at age 18 to join the Hungarian Handbag Guild as an apprentice. There she trained under the European system - as an apprentice and 'journeyman'. Finally she became the first women to achieve the highest possible rank of 'meister' or master, after she completed her final test - making an exemplary bag from start to finish. "By the time you're a master you've been through all the stages of making a handbag, from sewing to cutting to scyving the leather, through to framing and adding handtacks, and even to cleaning it up and placing it in tissue in a box. so you really have a basis for the whole business," Leiber explains.

"I'm a product of an archaic European system, a traditional guild program where you learned your craft from the bottom up. You learned a trade and your work was what you understood well. I like to know how to do things from start to finish," she reiterates.

When Leiber arrived in America in 1947 she joined the appropriate union and also the Handbag Association. She found a job working in a factory until one of the principals of the Handbag Association set her up to help his son, a designer, who was sketching bags to suit a low priceline. She was earning about $35 per week which was then "not too bad for a beginner" but she was very unhappy with the way mass market bags were manufactured. "They put the frame on and then they threw the bags into a laundry style basket. I was of course horrified because when we made leather bags we ran around the table looking for flaws before we put the patten down," she recalls, still visibly disturbed at the memory.

Her next experience was in a factory that produced very fine goods and Leiber stayed there for 14 years until the factory was moved to Europe. She then worked in a couple of other places but as she explains "my husband always says I've been training to go into my own business all my life, because I was always very interested in what was going on, in the volume being produced and how much money being made."

In 1963 she and her husband Gerson Leiber, decided she had "had enough, because when you work for someone else and you have design ability you're very frustrated that you can't express yourself," says Leiber.

As a successful artist in his own right, her husband understood his wife's frustration. Trained at art school under the GI Bill of Rights, Gerson Leiber's work is now represented in collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the National Gallery. Gerson Leiber is to this day the only other principal of Judith Leiber Inc. and Leiber insists he is "her staunchest supporter and greatest critic"

"When I started I didn't know how I was going to express myself really," says Leiber. "I began with a very classic bag and I followed the pattern of my former boss who came up with a different colour every year which he dyed all the skins - be they snake or leather or alligator.

"I picked a bilious pea green or lentil soup colour which I thought was wonderful and very chic at the time. It absolutely bombed!

"I already knew a lot of the customers so I was lucky enough to get Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf and Saks immediately, but of course in a very tiny way," she continues.

When she started Leiber had four people working for her. "My husband and I did everything else - we cleaned the place, packed the bags, shopped them from start to finish, all from a 280 foot loft. One of my customers used to say 'you make bags in the kitchen and sell them in the living room," she recalls smiling.

The business grew very quickly and Leiber started making snake bags out of whip snake cobras. Before it was classified as an endangered species or a popular fashion item, Leiber produced a quilted envelope in a variety of bright colours that really took off. The business was soon moved to a loft three times the size, but two or three years on the shelves were 'groaning' and overcrowded and it was moved to a 6000 foot loft. Leiber stayed there for seven years and liked it very much, although space was again becoming very tight. When it was bought by an advertising agency, the business took over one floor of a large building.

"One day the President of Saks 5th Avenue came to visit us," relates Leiber. "He said: 'Why can't you grow a little so you can really deliver merchandise to us? Oh, I'm too big already, I don't want to grow,' I answered.

"The following year it became impossible and this loft we now occupy was empty. First we toyed with the idea of taking half of it, but I'm glad we decided to take all of it because we have a stockroom, offices and work space. the people from Saks are still kidding me about it. I don't think I'll grow any larger but these might be famous last words.

"I could save a lot of money by moving to Long Island City and I would spend all day sitting in a taxi and that's not very interesting. This is much more convenient, the factory is all on one floor below us and I run up and down stairs all day - it's good exercise!"

Leiber supervises all aspects of the business, including the workroom and the 130 skilled staff members who make each bag by hand: gathering and folding reptile skins like fabric, shirring, quilting, re-embroidering and beading.

Every frame is designed by Leiber who first makes a wax model, creates a prototype in sterling silver then brings it to Europe where it is cast in brass. The bags are produced though a laborious process. A steel guide is produced that weighs half a ton, then a flat piece of brass is oiled and heated and a dye punch comes down bearing tons of weight, then, depending on how many details there are, some of the undercuts are stamped a second time in quite a complex process.

For Leiber, shape is the most important attribute of the handbag.

"Even a classic square bag has to have something to attract the customer, keep her interested and make her look very elegant," she contends. "The shapes vary, with the fundamental design criteria for a fine product being that it is integral and pleasant to hold as well as still stylish a few years on. Unfortunately mine are still stylish after 20 years which doesn't make me so happy," she laughs. "Luckily, 25 years ago, the shoulder strap wasn't so common and all the bags had little handles. This trend is coming back and now the customer says, "this bag is to beautiful, couldn't you put long handles on it. ' I always tell them, this bag was designed with short handles - buy a new one!"

Leiber bags have been carried to inaugurations and important occasions by First Ladies such as Maie Eisenhower, Nancy Reagan, and Barbara Bush. When Mrs. Bush presented her inaugural bags to the Smithsonian, she invited all the designers involved in making her clothes to a private luncheon in her family dining room. At this function, the Presidential canine, Milly, jumped on Leiber and in response to the First lady's reprimands, Leiber said: "Please don't do that. I'm a dog owner and I love it, it's quite alright. I'll make you a Milly".

Leiber then requested a photograph of Milly and Mrs Bush forwarded her a selection. "We copied the markings as best we could and Mrs Bush was so enchanted wit it that she took it everywhere with her," recalls Leiber. "She wore it to the Gridiron press dinner and everybody handed it around. The Washington post ran a big article about it. We were then invited to a White House dinner where she wore the bag and even President Bush remembered me," says Leiber, still chuffed at the Presidential attention. Raisa Gorbachev also went home to Moscow, toting a Leiber original as Mrs. Bush's State gift to her Russian counterpart.

Although she concedes that some of the best materials for her trade are no longer available for fashioning into her bags, she acknowledges the controls over endangered species and ever resourceful, she simply works around the restricted skins and is challenged to source more imaginative materials.

"I'll make a bag out of anything," she says. "The best materials are alligator, ostrich, lizard, silkskins and silks. We've even tried fish skin because it is abundant and not endangered but it was like a flounder and very difficult to work. then we tried ostrich legs which some people use - the centre looks rather like a turtle - and elephants and rhinoceroses, we even tried kangaroo. It's interesting work. Sometimes, it turns out not to be interesting to the customer - but that, she says shugging her shoulders and obviously not too perturbed, is fashion.

"We are restricted with tighter and tighter controls over endangered species. Our Louisiana alligators are beautifully patterned, but they're very well protected so I've never been able to work with them. We use the ring lizard from Indonesia which is not an endangered species but the Calcutta lizard is," continues Leiber.

Leiber has learned how to accomplish every step of superior handbag production: tanning skins to a softness and width usually seen only in fabric, engineering jewellery like clasps and frames with locks of every description (an effective pickpocket deterrent), painstakingly attaching rhinestones one by one with the tiniest jeweller's tweezers imaginable, designing a singular colour palette, even marketing and merchandising the finished items. For these skills she received the first Coty award ever conferred for accessory design.

Leiber produces about 100 designs a year, 30 for Spring and about 60 or 70 for autumn and key chains, pill boxes and belts besides. She thinks about a year ahead to enable her ideas to materialise in time. "Metal bags take a couple of years to come up fully formed. We see a version one season and five months later the correction may still not be quite right, so you can never anticipate exactly how long it will take. We always produce new forms, new shapes," Leiber explains.

Leiber's products are varied. Spring 1991 brings clovers, squares and pillow shapes with interesting locks; shells, shrimps and caterpillars for bag frames and belt buckles. A teddy bear is on the way and already ladies are trying to place orders, but both price and delivery date have yet to be determined. Antique bags following the 18th century European tradition of saving and re-embroidering every scrap of material have long been a popular item and one classic Leiber bag has been in production since 1967. "We may only ever produce 50 bags in particular style or we may make thousands if it's a classic seller," says Leiber.

Leiber's minaudieres (French for 'coquettish air') have included the "Precious Pup", often mistaken for Bush's Milly; "Fanciful Fruit", Leiber's fanciful orchard sprinkled with delicious jewels including watermelon seeds of cabochon cut onyx, "Panes of Tiffany," a pattern of poppies, buds and leafage in shape of rose, pink, lavender, amber and ochre inspired by Tiffany stained glass; deco style bags in suede and satin, with pearl clasps, or metallics fashioned in suede, lizard and opal into simple classic pouches or wild geometric shapes; soft oriental pouches or wild geometric shapes; soft oriental pouches created from antique Japanese silk, often lavishly jewelled and embroidered in solid blacks, reds, whites and multicoloured threads, with semi-precious stoned clasps.

Leiber has fashioned day bag collections almost as extravagant as her night time elegance. Snake, alligator and ostrich skins are fashioned into sumptuous bags with bold satin braid straps and luminously jewelled clasps. Debonair clutches, streamlined envelopes and roomy shoulder bags effortlessly travel from business breakfasts to the bargaining table or the opera box. the Fall 1990 palette reflected the couture collections' environmental hues including earth green, rosette, wheat and slate.

Charm bracelets have been incorporated into Leiber's envelopes and onto her key chains Leiber's pill boxes are tiny nature inspired minaudieres including nesting bird and seashell shaped boxes, along with amusing replicas like the mini-handbag. Her belts are made of polished alligator, soft ostrich, lizard or gold stretch, with whimsical buckles of pearl clusters, semi-precious jewels or oversized bows paved with rhinestones. Her wallets coordinate with the day bags. whimsical, fun, something to buy on impulse - something to put a smile on your face, that's what accessories should be," laughs Leiber merrily.

Leiber travels modestly - to Europe twice a year mostly on business, preferring to circulate between East Hampton and New York. Her products are, however, truly international. The Faberge Egg for example, initially made in Lucite with a gold frame and now produced in metal in Europe, is created from skins from England and stones cut in Hong Kong and Austria, with chains from America where the lining is also made and the stones are applied. "My husband says we are assemblers and not makers," says Leiber.

Leiber's bags are beginning to penetrate the international market as well. She elaborates, "We'll sell a little in Canada, Japan and Spain. We hope to sell in all of Europe and the Japanese people we are dealing with want to sell in Australia."

Leiber's vision, despite her command of an industry dominated by men, is a feminine one. "I have a daintier taste level," she contends. "I know what a woman needs, what she wants, what she will like." Leiber's own favourite handbag shape is a small, rounded clutch, but she accedes that the style "really depends on what you're wearing, but when I look at the fashions in clothing I think that a smaller bag will become even more important - and it makes a lady look like a lady."

"Ladies keep too much in their handbags," says Leiber. "That's my permanent complaint. They walk around with a bag on one should that is half a mile lower than the other because of all the stuff they carry. I tell them they should carry what they need not what they own!" she exclaims.

I look at my own bulging bag with some embarrassment. She catches my glance: "You're travelling," she says kindly. "You need your travellers cheques, your money, your tickets a tape recorder and an appointment book. That's why we make these tote bags. I think they're more feminine than brief cases! And you can throw your newspaper into it and an extra pair of shoes."

As she points to the quilted floral tote bag, I cannot but admire the permanent sales pitch. But I half expect this strong Hungarian woman to offer chicken soup in her next breath.