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The term It Girl was born in 1927. But It Bag? Much more recent. It was 2003 when the term was first used in Vogue. In a piece about the Tom Ford-ification of Gucci, Vogue’s Sarah Mower slipped it in as she described Ford and then-Gucci CEO Domenico de Sole’s approach to shoes and accessories: “The two moved incredibly fast, Ford stoking the smoldering desires of the cash-rich late ’90s for the new It bag and the It shoe.”
By the time Vogue’s February 2003 issue went to print, Ford and de Sole’s business model—of offering the same luxe product around the world supported by provocative advertising campaigns—had become the norm. It wasn’t just about bags or shoes anymore, either—you could have an It Accessory (Dior’s dice earrings), or an It Garment even (the Juicy Couture tracksuit). “It” was everywhere!
The dawn of social media and rise of street style in the early 2010s gave new life to It. Having it and wearing it wasn’t enough. You needed to promote it. Selfie it. Share it. The rapid-fire pace of consumption meant we needed more things over the course of the decade than ever before. As such, there is no one shoe, one bag, or one item of clothing that can sum up the many trends that occurred from 2010 to 2019. The things we’ve loved are everywhere, in every material, form, and shape, and serving every purpose. They are designed by mega-brands and small upstarts, they are beloved by a diverse group of fashion obsessives, and they are spoken about on message boards, Twitter, and Instagram with the intensity of the stock market or the NBA Draft. Pink pussy hats and Colin Kaepernick jerseys and “I’m With Her” tees are also It items—though they are not included on this list because they stand for much more than a fashion success story.
So back to the runways of New York, London, Milan, and Paris. However much the fashion world has changed since 2010, the It mentality remains: See it. Like it. Want it. Get it. Now, maybe resell it on The RealReal once it goes out.
Here, 17 of the It-est items we coveted over the past decade.
The Mansur Gavriel Bucket Bag
At the start of the decade, being trendy was synonymous with being big. What the marketing masterminds never could have accounted for was two women working in a compound in Southern California and their vegetable-tanned leather bucket bags. Launched by Rachel Mansur and Floriana Gavriel in 2012 with a single, boxy shape, Mansur Gavriel quickly became the hottest brand name in fashion. Their bucket bag could not be kept in stock online or in stores; such was the demand that massive international retailers were sending out sign-up lists and email alerts for the $595 bag. What Mansur Gavriel did, beyond making a covetable accessory, was crack open the floodgates to contemporary-priced bags that looked just as nice as Madison Avenue fare. Every Insta-brand has Rachel and Floriana to thank.
The Adam Selman x Le Specs Cat-Eye Sunglasses
We squinted through summer 2017 in Adam Selman’s inescapable “Last Lolita” sunglasses made in collaboration with the Australian eyewear brand Le Specs. Hamish Tame, a designer at Le Specs, told Vogue at the height of the shape’s fame, “We knew that it felt special, but we never in a million years could have imagined what a success the collaboration would become.” The success spanned not only the famous—Zoë Kravitz, Gigi Hadid, and Kendall Jenner were regular wearers and sharers—but the real people of the world. Stalk through a mall, trot down the street, enter any bar in Brooklyn, and you would have seen dozens of women and girls wearing the shape or one of the mass-produced knockoffs. These are the heroes of our tiny sunglasses obsession.
The Balenciaga Triple S Sneaker
The ugly shoe to rule them all, Balenciaga’s Triple S sneaker entered the cultural consciousness with a thud on the brand’s Fall 2017 menswear runway. The hulking shoes were made to look like a composite of other popular sneakers, bringing together soles, treads, and laces in a monstrous form that could make even Frankenstein cringe. So bad, so heavy…and yet so, so good. “It was really absolutely a proportional exercise of footwear, and not any kind of a gimmicky play with what was ugly or not ugly in shoe design,” Demna Gvasalia has said of the shoe’s genesis. Gimmick or not, shoppers rushed to get the sneakers like moths to a flame.
The Céline Luggage Tote
The deepest allure of Phoebe Philo’s Céline was, and always will be, the clothes. But she also could sell a bag, few as widely popular as the Luggage Tote. Though it came in three sizes, the largest was by and away the most prevalent. Celebrities had to have it. Street style stars couldn’t be without it. Regular women loved, wanted, and needed it. By this editor’s makeshift tally, no single item appeared more often in our street style slideshows than the Céline luggage tote.
The Kenzo Sweatshirt
When Carol Lim and Humberto Leon arrived at Kenzo as co-creative directors in 2011, the first thing they did was mine the house’s archives. There they found a tiger graphic first used by house founder Kenzo Takada in the ’70s and transformed it into the world’s most-coveted sweatshirt circa 2012. Instantly recognizable, the sweatshirt transformed the idea of logomania into something beyond a monogram and become a symbol of fashion cred in the mid-teens.
The Jacquemus Mini Bag
The Jacquemus mini bag is the meme queen of 2010s fashion. It’s so small, so impractical, so teensily adorable, you could just die. When designer Simon Porte Jacquemus first issued the bag in 2018, it was about iPhone-sized, meaning one could feasibly use it for a night out. Still, its smallness was picked up by fashion parody accounts and the style quickly went viral. Seizing on this opportunity, Jacquemus doubled down for Fall 2019, making a bag so small, nothing other than an AirPods case could fit inside. Illogical, impractical, meme-worthy—this micro bag sums up the ironic allure of late 2010s fashion.
The Gucci Fur-Lined Loafer
Alessandro Michele’s Gucci is an embarrassment of riches, with dozens of trophy pieces to fawn over and covet. But none can compare to the backless loafer he introduced at his Fall 2015 menswear debut for the brand. Lined with kangaroo fur (which the brand said was responsibly sourced; it has since stopped using fur altogether) the shoe combined the loucheness of Michele’s ready-to-wear with Gucci’s classic horsebit detailing. It was a simple subversion of class—the corporate loafer imbued with a bohemian flair—and a shoe, however humid one’s toes must be inside, that was empirically comfortable. Michele’s first hit of many.
The Vetements Jeans
Denim was de rigueur in the 2010s, and while the Rachel Comey Legion jeans and Citizens of Humanity’s cropped kick flares put up a good fight, Vetements’s patched-together denim was the clear victor. Originally made of up-cycled vintage jeans, the pants were a Margiela-esque repurposing of everyday items, priced at $1,450. When the style launched on Net-a-Porter in 2015, it sold out in every size in under one week. “The fit is not necessarily universal,” designer Demna Gvasalia told Vogue in 2015, “but it’s flattering for shorter women and for taller women, not necessarily just for models.” At the time, he said he planned to make the pattern available to download online, so aspiring shoppers could DIY their own denim. That never transpired, but you’d hardly know it based on the number of imitations that hit the market soon after.
The Stan Smith Sneaker
All-white leather with kelly green accents, the Stan Smith sneaker offered a reprieve from the can’t-miss-it clothing of the mid-aughts. Designers like Phoebe Philo and Raf Simons swore by them—Simons also designed his own take on the shoe in 2015—while street style stars like Veronika Heilbrunner and Ada Kokosar embraced the sneaker as an alternative to once omnipresent heels. It was the first trainer to really hit in high fashion, offering men and women a shoe with runway clout that could also be worn to gym class. The sneaker became so popular that its namesake, the tennis player Stan Smith, called his memoir, “Some People Think I’m a Shoe.”
The Dior Pearl Earring
Camille Miceli’s pièce de résistance during her tenure as Dior’s fashion jewelry head were these double pearl Tribale earrings. One of the first earrings to be sold as a single item instead of as a pair, the bauble promised the haute poshness of Dior with the arty ethos of its then-creative director Raf Simons, functioning as much as an art piece as jewelry.
The Balenciaga Cut-Out Boot
Balenciaga’s Spring 2011 cut-out boot sparkled a thousand knockoffs and caused just as many blisters. But pain was no match for the shoe’s instant appeal on the street style scene, where those seeking the Nicolas Ghesquière seal of approval were seen rocking the ankle boots with miniskirts just as Gisele Bündchen did in the brand’s ad campaign. True Ghesquière acolytes are still wearing the boot today—or hunting for the silhouette on the secondary market where they still fetch close to original retail price. The fact that Villanelle sports a pair in one of the early episodes of Killing Eve season one only adds to their appeal.
The Batsheva Dress
We all have Batsheva Hay to thank for our collective diversion into prairie-core in 2018. A former lawyer, Hay started making Amish-inspired cotton dresses for herself in 2017. New York’s in crowd was quick to adopt her quirky pieces, with Hollywood following shortly thereafter. Just two years into her business, Hay—a designer without any formal training—was a CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist and showing her ever-expanding collection at New York Fashion Week. Her style might be widely imitated, but no copy will every come close to capturing the strange allure of a Batsheva original.
The Yeezy 350 Boost Sneaker
Love them or hate them, you can’t deny the influence Kanye West’s Yeezy 350 Boots had on the sneaker market. Launched in 2015 in collaboration with Adidas Originals and sold via highly buzzed-about drops, the 350 shape introduced the fashion world to a new retail model that directly engaged with fans and shoppers. It also lent a new legitimacy to the secondary market, proving that a $200 sneaker could be as lusted over as an Hermès Birkin bag. According to Forbes, West’s Yeezy empire, of which the 350 is a crucial part, is valued at upwards of $1.5 billion in 2019.
The PS1 Bag
Proenza Schouler’s PS1 bag might have been introduced in 2008 but it became a must-have item in the early teens. A satchel shape that sat squarely between Chloé’s heavy Paddington and the more mass Cambridge Satchel Company bags, the PS1 won over the hearts of fashion girls with its bright colors and offbeat prints. It was a time of more-is-more style, all neons and bedazzled collars—and against all that color clash only a bag as bright as PS1’s neon and floral iterations would do.
The Valentino Rockstud Flats
The brainchild of then co-creative directors Pierpaolo Piccioli and Maria Grazia Chiuri, the Rockstud detail might be the most famous motif of the decade. Its rows of tiny, pyramidal studs could transform any item—bracelet, bag, barrette—into one that was immediately recognizable as Valentino. The star of the Rockstud family were the shoes, namely the T-strap heels or pointed flats. There was a moment in the 2010s when you couldn’t click through a BFA party recap or a red carpet slideshow without seeing the shoes. While their genesis was high-minded—the studs are reportedly inspired by details on Roman palazzo doors—the pretty-meets-punk look became so mainstream, entire brands existed just to create downmarket imitations.
The Louis Vuitton Mid-Layer Garment
We might not all be wearing harnesses, but you can’t argue against the virality of Virgil Abloh’s debut design at Louis Vuitton. Shown on the brand’s Spring 2019 menswear runway, the “mid-layer garments,” as Abloh refers to them, hit it big when Timothée Chalamet wore an embellished version to the Golden Globe Awards. Bridging the streetwear, runway, and red carpet worlds, the look alerted a new generation to designer fashion, and became a bellwether for where menswear would go at the end of the decade. Appropriately, GQ called it “the future of menswear.”
AirPods
Wearable technology was the keyword at the dawn of the 2010s, but no item cracked it quite like Apple’s AirPods. Yes, the wireless headphones meant an end to Jake Gyllenhaal-chewing-on-his-earbud-cord sightings, but look at what we got in return: Dior Men leather AirPod cases and a use for that teensy-tiny Jacquemus bag!