As acceptable levels of taste and trends tend to come and go, brands must adapt or die. It’s the basic principle of marketing and hence, business, and although you might not necessarily have to totally makeover your products, you’ve got to at least update them. Hence the Coach conundrum of shifting away from their classics and going in a more logo’ed direction, as the 1990s and early 2000s dictated. The brand never wavered in its success or profits, certainly finding customers for these styles, however I was not one of them. I remembered my Mom’s cool briefcase-looking Coach handbag and felt such a disconnect between the disparate two styles. Luckily, Coach recently revisited their classic collection of bags that made them an aspirational household name in the 1960s and 1970s, and introduced the Legacy Collection (pictured above), taken from the archives and updated with over-sized tassels, thinner premium leather, and nickel-coated zinc hardware. “It was time to reinvent our past,” stated Reed Krakoff, Coach’s creative director (and of the eponymous high end luxury label), in the Wall Street Journal article “Coach Comes Around to Reclaim Its Iconic Look.”
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