Fashion titan Krakoff is the president and creative director of Coach, the once-stodgy leather company he's managed to turn into a coveted accessories brand. He also has his own eponymous fashion line, which he launched in 2010.

Reed attended the ultra-preppy boarding school Taft, before studying economics and art history at Tufts and then enrolling in fashion design courses at Parsons. In the late '80s, he started his career in the design department at Ralph Lauren; a few years later he moved to Tommy Hilfiger, where he rose to head the marketing department and played a part in turning the company into a retail powerhouse in the early '90s. Those skills were desperately needed when he was tapped by Coach CEO Lew Frankfort to join the company as senior vice president and executive creative director in 1996. Coach was then struggling: Perceived as a replenishment brand, it was the sort of place you'd pick up a simple leather wallet, but it wasn't known for being fashion-forward and didn't have much cachet with consumers. Krakoff helped change all that, bringing in new designers, launching must-have handbags, introducing a fragrance line, and all but inventing the "accessible luxury" retail category.

By redesigning the stores from top to bottom and hiring top photographers like Mario Testino and Peter Lindbergh to shoot ad campaigns, Krakoff transformed Coach into a leather-goods leviathan and genuinely desirable brand, a startling turnaround that impressed even some of the most cynical fashionistas. But the brand's swift growth did little to change the fact that Coach has never had the prestige of its Euro competitors like Gucci and Louis Vuitton, and opening stores in places like Omaha and Little Rock hardly helped.

The "cherub-faced" exec is married to Paris-born interior decorator Delphine Krakoff. [Image via Getty]