She Built It in the Dark
Judith Leiber designed her handbags in her mind while confined in a Budapest ghetto during the Holocaust, then spent six decades turning scarcity, exile, and reinvention into a signature rather than a wound.
Angeli writes about how constraint becomes craft. This piece follows Judith Leiber from a Budapest ghetto to a name in the Met's permanent collections.
The Edge | By Angeli Gianchandani September 2, 2026 • 5 min read
Bergdorf Goodman, 1996.
In the mid-1990s, walking store floors was part of my job. I worked in fashion, and the research took me everywhere. Bergdorf Goodman at lunch, Bloomingdale's after a meeting, the Brimfield Antique Fair in Massachusetts on a weekend, the Salvation Army for vintage T-shirts, a color swatch, a fabric that sparked something. You could not understand the top of the market without looking in the unassuming places: a bookstore, a library, my father's closet.
One afternoon at lunch, I walked past the Judith Leiber counter at Bergdorf and stopped to look. The bags were glamorous and playful at once. A peacock in full crystal. A watermelon slice. A swan. Each one sitting in a glass case as if it belonged in a museum. My aunt carried one with her sari collection. It was always a reach, a special piece, something that moved between worlds. I stopped to admire what I already knew from a distance. I wanted to get closer.
Around the same time, I was taking a class at the Art Students League of New York on 57th Street, a few blocks away. I did not know then that the man who had trained in that same building was Gerson Leiber, an abstract expressionist painter and the husband of the woman whose work had just pulled me in.
Budapest
Her parents had a plan.
Judith Peto would study chemistry in London and come home to make skin creams. A sensible future for a well-to-do family in 1938. Her father noticed his daughter watching the handbags he brought home from business trips as gifts for her mother. He suggested she explore design. Then Germany invaded Austria and every plan dissolved.
Before the occupation, she went to work at Pessl, a Budapest handbag company. She learned to cut and mold leather, make patterns, frame and stitch bags into completion. She graduated from apprentice to journeyman to master craftswoman. A green toolbox was part of her diploma.
Then the war came for her city.
The Floor
Circumstances changed. Twenty-six people crowded into a Swiss-protected apartment, thanks to her father's own resourcefulness. Then the Hungarian Nazis moved them into a ghetto, bombs and machine gunfire in the streets, soldiers who planned to sweep them all into death camps.
Barred from leaving, Judith gave up her job at Pessl and waited.
So she designed.
She designed in her mind, one bag at a time, with the same precision she had learned at Pessl; she was building a world that had no place in the world she occupied, full of glamour, color, and joy, objects that carried stories.
Then liberation. Then a basement with sixty others, waiting for their building to be repaired. The habit did not stop. She kept designing.
By 1963, the craft had already carried her twenty years, through war, through other people's names, into her own.
She said later, without apology: "Hitler put me in the handbag business."
New York
After the Soviet Red Army liberated Budapest, Judith picked up her green toolbox and began making bags on the street, selling them to the wives of American officers to support her family. That is how she met Gerson Leiber. A Brooklyn-born Army Signal Corps sergeant, he stopped because of the bags. They talked. On their first date they went to the opera. They married in 1946 and arrived in New York in 1947. She was twenty-six years old. She carried nothing but a toolbox and the ability to build a bag from start to finish.
In New York, she could not find work that matched what she could do. So she walked into the office of the handbag union chief, green toolbox in hand, past his secretary, and said simply: "I want to make handbags from start to finish." She was hired.
She spent twelve years at Nettie Rosenstein, a Coty Award winner, eventually overseeing the entire New York factory. In 1953, Mamie Eisenhower stepped out at the inaugural ball carrying a bag embroidered with pearls and rhinestones. Judith had designed it. The credit went to Nettie Rosenstein.
When Rosenstein closed her fashion house in 1961, Judith had no more room under someone else's name.
Ten years after the inaugural ball, she put her own name on what she had always been making.
"I guess chemistry never worked out," she deadpanned. "So I became a bag lady."
Nothing Wasted
She launched her own brand in 1963 with a handful of employees in a midtown Manhattan studio.
A metal frame arrived discolored. In most workrooms it would have been discarded. Judith Leiber covered it in hand-applied Austrian crystals instead.
Most people tell this as a happy accident. Her generation had lived through rationing, displacement, and scarcity so acute that nothing of value was ever wasted, but scarcity alone does not explain the crystals. Judith turned the flaw into a shape no one had asked for and no rule required, reimagining the frame rather than just saving it. She found a way to make it say something it had never said before.
The crystals were instinct, not inspiration, and the mistake they covered became her signature years after she had already built the brand.
The Artisan
It took her hands and her vision both. Resourcefulness got her through what perseverance alone could not, and she called herself an artisan, not an artist, someone who could build a bag from start to finish.
Harold Koda, former curator of the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, saw it differently. "What she did was groundbreaking," Koda told the New York Times. "She gave bags and purses a narrative."
The bag was a diplomatic tool. It opened conversations between people who would never have stopped for each other. My aunt carried one with her sari to celebrations where it said everything before she said a word. First Ladies have carried Leiber purses to inaugurations since Mamie Eisenhower. The Indian bride carries a crystal elephant as part of her dowry, a luxury object and a cultural blessing at once. Hollywood has never stopped reaching for one.
Judith and Gerson had no children. The bags were hers. The paintings were his. The brand no longer needed her hands to keep going.
Still Stopping People
Earlier this year, Judith Leiber Couture placed first in accessories at the Met Gala, earning nine stars and $2.3 million in earned media, under a dress code built around the idea that fashion is art.
Her work sits in the permanent collections of the Met, the Smithsonian, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, though she never designed for any of them.
Judith never saw any of it. In April 2018, eight years before that Met Gala, Gerson told his wife of 72 years, the night before they died, "Sweetie, it's time for both of us to go." Both were gone within hours, she five after him. Ninety-seven years old, seventy-two years of marriage, over three thousand and five hundred designs.
Something pulled me in before I knew why. It was my way into the world she had built in the dark.
Copy Editor
Enid Burns is a Detroit-based journalist and editor. Her work has appeared in CNN, the New York Post, and CNET. She serves as copy editor for The Edge, reviewing each article before publication.
Sources
New York Times, via Jeffrey Sussman (the couple's spokesman and biographer), for Gerson Leiber's final words to his wife and the circumstances of both deaths, April 2018. Corroborated independently by Times of Israel, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, and the Seattle Times, all citing the same Times reporting.
New York Times, Harold Koda profile of Judith Leiber, for the "What she did was groundbreaking... She gave bags and purses a narrative" quote.
The Hollywood Reporter, "Met Gala Power Rankings," May 8, 2026, for the nine stars, first-place accessories finish, and $2.3 million Media Impact Value figure.
CBS News and multiple outlets, on the 2026 Met Gala's "Fashion Is Art" dress code and "Costume Art" exhibition theme.
Museum of Arts and Design, "Making Judith Leiber," and 1stDibs Introspective, for the Holocaust chronology and the over 3,500 handbag designs across Judith Leiber's 65 to 70 year career.
About The Edge
The Edge examines how culture, business, leadership, sport, and global systems shape markets, institutions, and the decisions leaders make. It features original essays and analysis by Angeli Gianchandani.
About the Author
Angeli Gianchandani is a global brand strategist, cultural intelligence practitioner, and educator. She advises leaders on commercial growth, brand value, and the decisions connecting current performance to long-term opportunity.
She is Adjunct Faculty at NYU School of Professional Studies, Visiting Lecturer at African Leadership University, and holds a master's degree from Tufts University's Fletcher School. Read more at mobilitygirl.com/theedge and Authory.
