Sweetening The Purse

Charming the Customer

This summer, New York's ready-to-wear designers prepared their spring 2008 collections for the runway shows that begin Wednesday. If they are lucky, the clothes will appeal to that tiny percentage of customers who have made peace with spending $800 or more on a day dress. Krakoff spent his summer focused on the needs of everyone else.

On a sticky June afternoon, in an over-air-conditioned loft in Chelsea Piers, Krakoff is alternately scrutinizing Polaroid pictures and hunched over a large-format camera. He is photographing the company's holiday advertising campaign -- dubbed "Bleecker," after the Manhattan street where the company is opening one of two boutiques that will be focused on fashion bags and limited-edition ones.

When Krakoff first came to Coach, he hired pedigreed fashion photographers such as Mario Testino for this kind of work. But since he began studying photography about two years ago at Parsons, where he also received a degree in fashion design, Krakoff has been doing it himself. From reinterpreting and modernizing an established brand's sensibility to directing the advertising campaign, Krakoff is a middle-market version of Chanel's Karl Lagerfeld.

The company's ads have livened up significantly from the early days when they celebrated American cultural history with sober shots of famous scions -- Gary Cooper's daughter, a descendant of Mark Twain -- with their favorite Coach products.

Now Krakoff is standing in front of four long-limbed young models draped in Coach handbags, hats and scarves. They are heavily styled with white tights and wedge heels, cellophane corsages and picture hats adorned with giant protruding feathers. Nothing about the image suggests utilitarian. It screams fashion.

Also on the set is a 3-year-old Jack Russell terrier named Finney, decked out in a tartan print overcoat.

For the current shoot, Krakoff is choosing from a sprawling selection of products atop a maze of tables: handbags, scarves, hats, shoes, gloves and charms. Coach helped popularize the idea of accessorizing one's accessories with charms ranging in price from $28 to $38. (An impulse purchase for some shoppers; an indulgent introduction to the Coach brand for others.) Although Prada has received most of the credit within the fashion industry for mainstreaming this kind of childish charm, Krakoff says his came first.

"We did it three years before them," he says. "We saw them seven years ago in Japan. People were hanging key chains on bags; girls would hang little charms on their cellphones." But he stops short of being bothered. "I would sound silly saying, 'I invented the key fob.' We're really not about starting trends. I really don't care."

Some fashion snobs deride Coach, unable to deal with the idea that a handbag so readily accessible, so vaguely democratic, could also be so desirable. They dismiss it as a starter bag -- and an ugly bag. The Web site Bagsnob.com, which offers critical assessments of new handbags, showed no mercy in critiquing Coach's patchwork bags. "I know I sound like a total snob when I say that I cringe when I have to walk by a Coach store. . . . The other day . . . I inadvertently stopped in front of a Coach store. I looked up and was assaulted by a wall to wall display of their hideous patchwork bags! I almost passed out and wanted to run but could not tear my eyes away from these deformed-looking bags!"

Of that review, Krakoff responds: "I'm okay with that. We can't please everybody. We're here to please the customer."

Kibibi Springs, 34, is an extremely happy customer. She remembers her first Coach bag: a black suede Duffle Sac purchased in 1995. She still uses it. "They should keep up the good work. I think they have a great brand," she says.

"When I think of Coach, I think it's classic but also on trend without being trendy," says the Los Angeles-based Springs, who works in marketing for the entertainment industry. She shops across the spectrum from high-end designers to mass merchants. She says Coach gets the seasonal colors right, the patterns. But the lines are classic. "It's not a toss-away item."