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"   Reed Krakoff at FIAF last night. Photo: Getty Images  Before becoming creative director at Coach in 1996, Reed Krakoff told a sold-out crowd at New York&amp;#039;s French Institute Alliance Fran\u00E7aise (FIAF) last night, he had never before designed a handbag. &amp;quot;When I started at Coach, I&amp;#039;d never done handbags, never done accessories,&amp;quot; he admitted. &amp;quot;Actually, I was a menswear designer. It&amp;#039;s funny, no one [at Coach] ever asked me if I had done a handbag before. It&amp;#039;s kind of an obvious question, right? I didn&amp;#039;t say I did, but I didn&amp;#039;t say I didn&amp;#039;t, I guess.&amp;quot; Throughout the evening, Krakoff fielded questions from Pamela Golbin, Chief Curator of the Mus\u00E9e de la Mode et du Textile at the Louvre, about both his work at Coach and his newer endeavor\u2014the eponymous brand he launched in 2010. Comparing the two, Krakoff explained: &amp;quot;A lot of times I say one is like a teenager, and the other one&amp;#039;s like a baby. Or a small child. The big one has grownup problems, and the small one has different kind of problems. They&amp;#039;re like having two children.&amp;quot; Speaking of children, during the audience Q&amp;amp;amp;A portion of the talk, his 8-year-old daughter, Lily, chimed in with a question of her own. His answer, and a few more highlights from the event, below. Krakoff on failing and almost getting fired: &amp;quot;One of the gifts I&amp;#039;ve had at Coach is the ability to fail and the ability to try things. When I started, I had a lot of failures, and of course at some point I was told that if I had another one, I wasn&amp;#039;t going to be there. That&amp;#039;s actually true. A lot of designers don&amp;#039;t have that kind of time. I feel incredibly lucky that I&amp;#039;ve been able to kind of flail around and try things. And fail. You have to.&amp;quot; On other designers: &amp;quot;I feel a lot for designers today, they don&amp;#039;t get time from the big companies. They get two collections, and they have to redefine a brand, and get great reviews, and be commercially successful, and have an iconic handbag. It&amp;#039;s just not possible. And I think unfortunately that&amp;#039;s what people expect these days.&amp;quot; On overseeing Coach: &amp;quot;At Coach, we have thousands of things every year. And we have hundreds of people. That being said, I still see every single product.&amp;quot; On the reaction when he first decided to do his own brand: &amp;quot;I had some people\u2014more than a few\u2014say, `This is ridiculous. Why would you want to do this? Just be happy with what you&amp;#039;re doing.&amp;#039; I had my PR person say that to me.&amp;quot; Answering his daughter Lily, on his favorite piece he&amp;#039;s designed: &amp;quot;The Boxer bag. I remember sketching it in the back of a car, with my wife Delphine sitting next to me. And I think probably that because it was the first time that something felt like it embodied this idea of what the [Reed Krakoff] brand was about. It was tough and cool, but it had a femininity to it. It was something that felt new and iconic, but had a sense of history with it, because it wasn&amp;#039;t so contemporary and fashiony that it felt like something that was trendy.&amp;quot; On the legacy he hopes to leave with Reed Krakoff: &amp;quot;Last time I was in Paris, I saw in the bookstore a poster that had a list of all the major 20th century artists, and each one had one word next to their name. So Yves Klein said cobalt, Manzoni had plaster, Joseph Beuys had felt. If you can boil it down to something even close to that, you know you&amp;#039;ve succeeded. I don&amp;#039;t have one word yet, I don&amp;#039;t. That&amp;#039;s the objective, getting there, [having] a group of symbols and ideas associated with the brand.&amp;quot; On fashion critics: &amp;quot;You can&amp;#039;t have any regrets about anything we do. I know in my heart what I did well and didn&amp;#039;t do well, no one&amp;#039;s going to change that. There&amp;#039;s something that I&amp;#039;ve done after every collection is finished: I sit with the design team, and I tell them how I feel about it before the reviews, because I don&amp;#039;t want anyone to think I&amp;#039;m waiting until some person sitting at a computer somewhere tells the world that they loved it or they hated it.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/news/a8679/reed-krakoff-on-bags-mistakes-his-legacy-39700/>