Love It or Leave It: Alexander Wang and Judith Leiber’s Unlikely, Beyoncé-Approved Collaboration Clutch

Wang and Leiber are strange bedfellows, but we really like the results of their partnership

Amanda Mull

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Oct 20, 2017

Alexander Wang brings a knowing, downtown edge; Judith Leiber contributes the fantasy of jeweled evening bags taken to their most literal extreme. Like an ironic Judith Leiber clutch for millennials. When the money roll minaudière appeared on the runway at Alexander Wang’s Spring 2018 show, it read like a smart twist on the classic Leiber party bag: a gleaming object that borrowed the visual language of wealth and made it wink.

As the season’s shows wore on, the bag slipped my mind, but it came barreling back into my consciousness when Beyoncé carried it to the Tidal X: Brooklyn event at Barclays Center in New York, helpfully immortalizing it on her Instagram, along with the rest of her stunning, jewel-toned outfit. The joke lands because the bag is executed with real luxury materials and meticulous attention to detail rather than as a novelty afterthought. Except, of course, the entire thing (except for the rubber band) is rendered in glittering crystals, right down to the writing that would be on an actual bill.

Formal evening bags can feel disconnected from the more casual way many people dress now, but this design reframes the category instead of abandoning it. Evening bags have been something of a tough sell for younger luxury consumers, whose lives tend to skew more casual than previous generations of the wealthy. This bag, though, is a winking, slightly rude rebuke to the concept of designer eveningwear as a whole—after all, isn’t anyone with one of Leiber’s bags carrying what is, on a spiritual level, more or less just a roll of cash? The result is a bag that feels self-aware without becoming disposable.

The bag is, of course, limited edition, and although it retailed for $4,995 when it became available on Wang’s website this week, the design has already sold out. For buyers, that matters.

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