Non-clothing items like jewelry, bags, scarves, etc.
The word carries a demotion in its root. Accessorius was late Latin for the subordinate party — the one who follows, assists, attends upon the principal. English inherited the sense intact: an accessory was the lesser thing, added after the fact, of no consequence on its own. Fashion has spent the last century inverting that meaning entirely, and the accounts of every great house now record the inversion in full.
The Commercial Centre
At most of the maisons, leather goods, footwear, eyewear, silk and jewellery together earn a great deal more than the clothes. The reasons are unromantic and irrefutable. A handbag has no size, so it can be bought as a gift, bought online without risk, bought by a traveller in a language she does not speak. A successful shape can be sold for thirty years, where a dress has one season. And the margins are simply better. The runway collection, for all its authority, is in commercial terms very often an argument for the object carried down it.
The Grammar of Recognition
Accessories are also where a house keeps its signatures. A clasp, a chain, a buckle, a hardware finish, a particular shade of lining — these survive changes of creative director in a way that hemlines do not, and they are what a client recognises across a crowded room. The small leather good is usually a customer’s first purchase from a house and frequently the one that decides whether there will be a second.
For anyone building a career in luxury, this is the part of the business with the most weight behind it: accessories design and product development are among the largest and best-funded teams in any maison, and on the shop floor, the accessory is what most conversations are actually about.