Anya Hindmarch

Anya Hindmarch

Anya Hindmarch started her label in London in 1987 at nineteen, with no design school behind her, after a year in Florence learning the leather trade from the craftsmen who worked in it. She sold her first five hundred bags through a magazine offer and used the proceeds as start-up capital.

Bags

Hindmarch went to Florence in 1986 to study Italian and came back with a handbag business instead. The first product was inspired by an Italian leather drawstring duffel, and she was nineteen when the label launched in 1987. The first shop, on Walton Street, opened in 1993, and Princess Diana became an early customer.

More Bags

Personalisation is the house's real invention. Be A Bag, launched in 2001 with support from Kate Moss and Elton John, printed customers' own photographs onto bags and began as a breast cancer fundraiser. The leather Stickers that let you customise a bag came later and became a genuine business in their own right.

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In 2007 she made the I'm NOT A Plastic Bag canvas tote with the campaign group We Are What We Do, and it turned into a national news story that fed straight into Britain's eventual plastic-bag charge. Vanity Fair put it in the Oscars gift bags. She followed it in 2020 with I Am A Plastic Bag, made from recycled bottles.

More from the collection

The ownership history is a loop. The Qatari fund Mayhoola, which also owns Valentino and Balmain, bought in from 2012 and built its stake up over several years, the brand parted ways with it in March 2019 and was sold to Javad Marandi and his wife, and Hindmarch came back in as managing director that year. She has been designing British Airways First Class amenity kits since 2000.

Our honest take

Hindmarch has the trophies: Accessories Designer of the Year in 2001, the first Designer Brand of the Year in 2007, an MBE in 2009, a CBE in 2017, a DBE in 2024, and a Royal Warrant from Queen Camilla in April 2026. Buy the bows and the personalisation, which is where the house is genuinely unlike anyone else. The food-logo novelty pieces are fun and will date, and that is fine as long as you know it going in.