Shoes
Shoes
Bembien Bags and Shoes
Yi-Mei Truxes launched Bembien in 2017 in Brooklyn after six years running marketing for Vogue, following a chance sighting of a stranger's disheveled straw bag on a downtown street. The label works almost entirely through artisan weavers in Bali, treating a basket bag as a craft object rather than a factory good
Magda Butrym Dresses: Rosette Midis, Blazers and Shoes
Magda Butrym, born in Zabrze, Poland, worked for years as a stylist and ran a short-lived earlier label, Portofino, before launching her eponymous house in Warsaw in 2014. The label built its identity by working directly with Polish artisans, turning regional hand-knitted lace and hand-plaited leatherwork into signatures rather than trims.
Fleur du Mal Dresses and Shoes
Jennifer Zuccarini launched Fleur du Mal in New York in 2012 after stints co-founding Kiki de Montparnasse and designing intimates at Victoria's Secret, taking the brand's name from Baudelaire's collection of poems. Her pitch was lingerie meant to be worn on an ordinary day rather than saved for an occasion, which is why the label expanded into ready-to-wear and swim without ever losing its underpinnings logic.
Golden Goose Shoes
Alessandro Gallo and Francesca Rinaldo started Golden Goose in a garage in Marghera, near Venice, in 2000, when they were both in their early twenties. The brand's entire identity rests on a single idea introduced in 2007, the Super-Star sneaker, hand-distressed until it looks like it has already lived a life before you bought it.
Proenza Schouler Bags and Dresses
Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez met at Parsons in New York and founded Proenza Schouler, named for their mothers' maiden names, when Barneys bought their senior thesis collection outright in 2002. The label built its reputation on the PS1 satchel, introduced in 2008, and on a run of CFDA awards including the first-ever CFDA and Vogue Fashion Fund prize in 2004.
Black Suede Studio Shoes: Montreal Loafers, Boots and Mules
Kris Avakian launched Black Suede Studio out of Montreal in 2018, after years spent inside his family's accessories manufacturing business, including a stint running quality control at their factory in Qingdao, China. The label's whole premise was closing a gap he saw in footwear: shoes with real quality and comfort at a level nobody else was hitting, a conviction strong enough that he later moved production to Brazil to get the craftsmanship right.
Gabriela Hearst Shoes and Bags
Gabriela Hearst grew up on her family's ranch in Paysandu, Uruguay, and after more than a decade working in New York design, launched her eponymous label for fall 2015 built explicitly around sustainability and a long-term view of clothing. The house has stayed close to that premise, from a partnership with the Uruguayan knitting cooperative Manos del Uruguay to a 2017 runway show run on roughly 30 percent deadstock fabric, while Hearst herself went on to lead Chloe from 2020 to 2023 as its first Latin American creative director.
Jacquemus Bags and Shoes
Simon Porte Jacquemus founded his label in Paris in 2009, at twenty, naming it after his mother's maiden name the same year she died, a loss he has described as the shock that pushed him to start designing. The house grew from a one-man operation into an independent fashion company with hundreds of employees, opening its first permanent store on Avenue Montaigne in 2022 after years of building a name through inventive presentations and a fast-growing digital following.
Ferragamo Shoes and Bags
Salvatore Ferragamo trained shoemakers in Hollywood before returning home to incorporate his company in Florence in 1927, chasing better artisans than he could find in America. He spent the following decades engineering the shoe as much as designing it, patenting the cork wedge and steel shank and improvising with raffia and nylon during wartime material shortages.
Christopher Esber Dresses and Shoes
Christopher Esber founded his namesake label in Sydney in 2010, aged twenty two, on a small loan from his parents. The work is built on deconstructed tailoring and sculptural, negative-space cutting, the kind of engineering that makes a dress look undone and precisely controlled at once.
Givenchy Bags and Dresses
Hubert de Givenchy opened his own Paris couture house in 1952 at just 24, after training under Jacques Fath, Robert Piguet, Lucien Lelong and Elsa Schiaparelli. His debut collection of interchangeable separates in raw cotton shirting, anchored by the white Bettina blouse, made practicality itself the news, and the house's identity was cemented a year later when he met Audrey Hepburn and began dressing her both on screen and off.
Roger Vivier Shoes
Roger Vivier opened his own atelier in Paris in 1937 after studying sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts, and by 1953 he was designing shoes exclusively for Christian Dior, the first time a couturier ever let a shoemaker's name share a label with his own. In 1954 Vivier is credited with engineering the modern stiletto heel using a thin steel rod for structure, and he went on to design the buckled pump later worn by Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour.
Gianvito Rossi Shoes
Gianvito Rossi launched his own footwear label in Milan in 2006, after years working alongside his father, the shoe designer Sergio Rossi, in the family's factories in San Mauro Pascoli. The house built its name on a handful of disciplined, unembellished silhouettes, chiefly the Gianvito 105 pump and the Portofino sandal, made with the same regional Italian craftsmanship he grew up around.
Dries Van Noten Shoes
Dries Van Noten launched his first menswear collection in 1986 in Antwerp, showing it in London with five classmates from the Royal Academy who became known as the Antwerp Six. What set him apart from the group was a refusal to chase a single signature look, instead building a reputation on pattern mixing, botanical prints and a stubborn independence from the usual industry calendar.
Balenciaga Shoes and Bags
Cristóbal Balenciaga opened his first atelier in San Sebastián in 1917, then moved the whole operation to Paris in 1937 once the Spanish Civil War made staying home impossible. What he built there was less about decoration than engineering: the sack dress, the cocoon coat, silhouettes cut with such structural control that Dior reportedly called him the master of the rest of them.
Valentino Garavani Shoes and Bags
Valentino Garavani opened his own atelier on Rome's Via Condotti in 1959 and formally established the house in 1960 with Giancarlo Giammetti, an architecture student he met that year who became the business partner running the commercial side. The 1962 haute couture debut at Palazzo Pitti in Florence made the house's name almost overnight, and its saturated signature red, nicknamed Rosso Valentino, has stayed a house code ever since.
Christian Louboutin Shoes
Christian Louboutin opened his first Paris boutique in November 1991, in a small arcade near the Louvre, after years spent designing shoes for Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent and a detour into landscape gardening. The whole enterprise turns on one stubborn idea, a lacquered red sole that turns the underside of a shoe into the signature, so a heel is recognizable from across a room before anyone sees the front of it.
Chloé Shoes and Bags
Gaby Aghion started Chloé in Paris in 1952, naming the house after a friend because a woman of her social standing was not supposed to have a job. The label made its name by treating luxury as something you could wear off the rack rather than have fitted at a couture house, and it kept proving that with the designers who passed through, from Karl Lagerfeld to Stella McCartney to Phoebe Philo.
Toteme
Elin Kling, a Swedish fashion journalist, and Karl Lindman, an art director who had worked with Interview magazine, founded Toteme in New York in 2014, the same year they married, before moving the company back to their native Stockholm in 2016. The name started as Totem until Kling suggested softening it with a final e, and the label built its identity on pared-back Scandinavian tailoring: poplin shirtdresses, boxy bouclé jackets and a signature fringed scarf detail.
Miu Miu Shoes and Knitwear
Miuccia Prada conceived Miu Miu in 1992 and launched it publicly in 1993, naming it after her own childhood nickname and opening its first boutique on Via della Spiga in Milan. The debut collection was cowgirl-themed, fringed suede and patchwork prairie skirts, a deliberate swerve away from the tailored minimalism of the main Prada line so she would have somewhere to be irreverent without diluting it.
St. Agni: The Byron Bay Label by Lara and Matt Fells
Lara and Matt Fells, a married couple with retail backgrounds rather than design degrees, started their label in Byron Bay, Australia, in 2014 with a maxed-out credit card and a handful of leather tote bags. The brand found its signature in woven mules introduced around its third year, pieces that reportedly sold out on repeat, before it grew into a full ready-to-wear range still designed and headquartered in that same coastal town.
STAUD Dresses and Bags
Sarah Staudinger, previously the fashion director at Reformation, launched Staud in Los Angeles in 2015 with business partner George Augusto, naming it after her own childhood nickname. The brand started as a made-to-order customization concept before pivoting to ready-to-wear once customers made clear they wanted the bags and dresses as designed, a shift that produced breakout accessories like the Bissett and Moreau bucket bags.
Saint Laurent: The Paris House Founded in 1961
Saint Laurent is the Paris house Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé opened on December 4, 1961. I go through the accessories and shoes worth a look.
The Row Bags and Shoes
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen founded The Row in New York in 2006, after Ashley spent a year trying to design an ideal, no-logo white T-shirt and the pair built it into a seven-piece debut collection that Barneys bought in full. They named it after Savile Row and, for its first three years, gave no interviews about it at all, betting the clothes could carry the label without their names on it.