HERMÉS KELLY BAG 2 WAY 35 cm CHEVRE LEATHER, black, collection B - 1998

In 1837, Thierry Hermès (1801–78) founded his eponymous luxury goods company in Paris as a saddle manufacturer, serving the era’s carriage trade. In 1880, under the stewardship of Thierry's son Émile-Charles, fine riding gear was added to its offerings to complement the saddles. Hermès eventually expanded their workshops to design handbags in the years that followed. The Kelly bag, originally introduced as the Sac à dépêches (“the dispatch bag”) in 1935, was created by Robert Dumas, son-in-law to Thierry's grandson Émile-Maurice Hermès. 

Designed for independent women who wanted a piece that was both luxurious and efficient, the Kelly bag has a trapezoid shape, two triangular gussets, a sculpted flap and a handle.

To this day, the understated bag comprises 36 individual leather pieces, 16 studs and a signature padlock and leather key cover, with three layers of leather at the base to ensure the bag can stand upright. Each Kelly bag takes between 18 and 25 hours to produce, and its 680 hand stitches owe solely to one Hermès artisan.

The Kelly bag earned its name during preproduction on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1955 film, To Catch a Thief. Costume designer Edith Head sourced products from Hermès to outfit actress Grace Kelly, who fell in love with the Sac à Dépêches and continued to carry it long after the movie wrapped.

Months after marrying Prince Rainier III of Monaco in 1956, Kelly was spotted carrying a brown pigskin Sac to shield her pregnancy from the paparazzi. And while the oft-repeated claim that Kelly and her bag appeared on a Life magazine cover isn’t true, photography of the actress and her cherished accessory began to appear everywhere at the time, and the bag’s profile suddenly skyrocketed. 

In 1977 Hermès officially changed the item’s name to the Kelly bag. Less than a decade later, Hermès introduced another top-handled bag to its line, also named after a style symbol, the Birkin bag.

The Paris-based British actress Jane Birkin sat next to Hermès CEO Jean-Louis Dumas — Robert's son — on an Air France flight. He noticed her overflowing handbag, and she told him she longed for “a handbag that is bigger than the Kelly but smaller than Serge’s suitcase,” in reference to her then-romantic partner, the French musician Serge Gainsbourg. The Birkin bag was created in 1984, joining the Kelly in Hermès’ permanent collection.

More than a mere tastemaker, Karl Lagerfeld devoted himself to the continual pursuit of chic. “My life and my job,” the designer once said, “is to forget myself.” From his first collection at Chanel — after joining the brand in the early 1980s — he injected the venerable house with a frisson of modernity. Vintage Karl Lagerfeld designs for Chanel handbags, evening dresses, coats, jewelry and other clothing and accessories riffed on its iconography — tweed skirt suits, pearls, camellias — accenting a lexicon of Chanel-isms with tastes of the moment.

During his five-decade career as a designer for Chanel, Fendi, Chloé and many others, Lagerfeld was a quintessential chameleon, ever evolving to embody the times. An outsize, instantly recognizable personality — his ponytail powdered like an 18th-century viscount, his eyes perpetually shielded by dark glasses, wearing fistfuls of chunky silver jewels — Lagerfeld was, above all, an avatar of style.

Born in Hamburg (in 1933, ’35, or ’38 by varying accounts), Karl Lagerfeld packed his bags for Paris in 1954. His design for a coat won him the International Wool Secretariat and landed him a job with the celebrated couturier Pierre Balmain.

Lagerfeld went on to become the designer of Jean Patou, eventually realizing that his seemingly endless ideas could fuel a career as a designer-for-hire. As such, he lent his vision to everyone from Loewe and Max Mara to Krizia and Charles Jourdan, nimbly moving among a diverse range of styles. It was an unprecedented way of working in the days when freelance was still a dirty word.

During the late ’60s and ’70s, Lagerfeld refashioned Chloé to reflect the free spirit of the day and, beginning in 1965, joined forces with the Fendi family, taking it from sleepy furrier to fashion’s haute-est stratum. Because of his track record for reviving and reimagining brands that had grown stagnant, in 1983 Lagerfeld was handed the reins at Chanel, which had been gathering dust since its founder’s heyday.

Lagerfeld’s collections for the brand displayed his knack for synthesizing old and new, high and low. From Watteau (Spring/Summer 1985 couture) and Serge Roche (Spring/Summer 1990 ready-to-wear) to hip-hop fly girls (Fall/Winter 1991 ready-to-wear), surfers (Spring/Summer 2003 ready-to-wear) and ancient Egypt (Pre-Fall 2019), he used each season’s inspiration to conceive Chanel’s signatures anew.

Lagerfeld revived the house's ballet flats and thoroughly embraced the classic logo's interlocking CCs, which became a common and immediately recognizable feature of Chanel flap bags. Many of the rare Chanel bags much sought after today — and Chanel bags of the 1990s, generally — are objects of pure fantasy conjured up by the late couturier. 

Despite producing eight collections a year for Chanel, as well as four to five for Fendi, Lagerfeld never faltered in proposing new ideas each time he put pencil to paper.

Find vintage Karl Lagerfeld Chanel day dresses, jackets, shoes and more on 1stDibs.