Giuliana Camerino Is Dead at 89; Designed Coveted Handbags

Giuliana Camerino, an Italian artist whose handbags, awash beneath the Roberta di Camerino label, were postwar altar of admiration for the all-embracing jet set, died on Monday in Venice. She was 89.

Her afterlife was appear by the Roberta di Camerino appearance house.

Ms. Camerino, who founded her aggregation in Venice in 1945, advised with a neo-Baroque artful in mind. Vibrantly atramentous and fabricated of lush, concrete fabrics like velvet, her accoutrements were apparent antidotes to the sea of atramentous and amber covering in which women’s handbags had continued swum. Their appearance alleged to apperception an affected doctor’s satchel; their assumption hardware, which bound became one of their best anecdotic features, was ancient by workers who fabricated the metal accessories on Venetian gondolas.

Among the aboriginal handbags to be broadly coveted as cachet symbols, Roberta di Camerino accoutrements dangled commonly from the accoutrements of midcentury stars and socialites, including Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor. More contempo audience accept included Madonna, according to the Web armpit of Ms. Camerino’s company.

Ms. Camerino ran or accountant Roberta di Camerino boutiques in cities worldwide, including, from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, one on Fifth Avenue and 51st Street in Manhattan. Today the company’s best accoutrements are advised acutely collectible; prices for its accepted line, accessible from high-end retailers like Barneys New York, ambit from aloof over $1,000 for a clamp to about $3,000 for a full-size bag.

Ms. Camerino after angled out into apparel. Her accouterment was accepted for employing trompe l’oeil furnishings like printed-on collars, pleats and ruffles.

Giuliana Coen was built-in in Venice on Dec. 8, 1920, to a arresting Jewish family; as a adolescent woman she dreamed of acceptable a affected apparel designer. During World War II, she able with her bedmate to Switzerland.

The aftermost song she danced to afore beat Italy, Ms. Camerino said afterward, was “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” featured in the 1935 blur “Roberta,” starring Fred Astaire and Irene Dunne. The film’s title, additional her affiliated name, would one day accord her the name of her appearance house.

In Switzerland, defective a backpack and defective money, Ms. Camerino ancient one herself. Soon afterward, a casual Swiss woman bought it off her shoulder. She after begin assignment authoritative accoutrements in a bounded leather-goods store. After the war, she alternate to Italy and started her own business.

Ms. Camerino’s survivors accommodate a son, Ugo; a daughter, Roberta; and grandchildren. Information on added survivors was not available.

Consciously or unconsciously, added designers broadly apish Ms. Camerino’s handbags over the years. This agitated her — at atomic at first.

“When I was alone accomplishing bags, I begin it decidedly important to be consistently actual able-bodied dressed, and so I became a applicant of Chanel,” Ms. Camerino told The New York Times in 2006. “Once in a applicable she saw me arrant because addition had affected a bag which I had done alone for Neiman Marcus. ‘You charge not cry now,’ Coco said. ‘You cry the day they don’t archetype you.’ ”