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is calling it the Legacy Collection—a shot at reinventing “old Coach.” Burnished cowhide. Turn-lock closures. One small logo. After a 15-year affair with lightweight PVC bags covered in Cs, Coach is bringing back the styles that made it—at one time—one of the most beloved bag makers in the world.

In the coming weeks, stores will begin receiving the first Coach Legacy Collection bags for fall 2012. Faithful to the brand’s iconic shapes and saddlery detailing, they’ve been updated with larger sizes, lighter weights, interior linings and cellphone pockets.

The thinner leather, canvas linings and nickel-coated zinc hardware (not brass) are a departure from the Coach of old. Its famous duffel will now come with an adjustable strap and is embellished with tassels—and a juicy array of colors in addition to the old-Coach black and brown. It’s priced at $398.

One change that could throw longtime consumers: the material. Executives say the leather is the same Coach as before, but with the back shaved off to make it thinner and lighter&#8212,Hermes Birkin 25;a change that is more expensive to produce. They say the material, requested by consumer focus groups, will wear to a welcome patina, like old-Coach bags.

The bags are intended to reinterpret old-Coach rather than duplicate it, they say. While Legacy will be Coach’s primary collection, it will continue to introduce other bag styles, as well as its more old-Coach style Classic collection that is available on its website without being marketed. (To find Classic bags, search for the term on the website, as they aren’t highlighted.)

Bloomingdales is anticipating the Legacy shipment’s arrival in a week or so—and has plans for a vivid display in its New York flagship store. “We see this as very fashion-forward and very fashion-right for right now,” says Brooke Jaffe, the department stores’ fashion director for accessories.

When Bloomingdales buyers saw the Legacy collection at Coach’s showroom several months ago, Ms,Belstaff Boots sale. Jaffe says that nostalgia pulled at the senior buyers’ “heartstrings,” while her younger assistant found the bags intriguingly modern.

Coach executives may have been among the last to realize that old-Coach has become hot again.

, Coach’s chairman and chief executive, concedes that he ignored his own two daughters’ pleas to bring back old-Coach for “too many years.” He says it was finally a “confluence of factors that brought us back to the future.”

Last year, Mr. Frankfort’s daughter Alana, who is 28, came home with a friend who was carrying a small vintage Coach Dinky bag that she’d picked up at the Brooklyn Flea market. This coincided with a curious phenomenon that Coach archivists were noticing: Prices for the brand’s vintage bags were rising on . Then other brands,cheap Tods Womens Lace Shoes, including Chloe and J. Crew, showed simple, sturdy saddle-leather bags in their own 2011 collections, some with a duffel-like silhouette reminiscent of old-Coach,Jimmy Choo Bridal Shoes.

Then executives at designer website Net-A-Porter spied the trend. “Our buy team began to notice cool girls in the course of our travels who were wearing vintage Coach bags and had the idea to reach out to Coach to reissue some of our favorite styles from the ’70s and ’80s,” says Alison Loehnis, the site’s president.

“It was time to reinvent our past,” says Reed Krakoff, Coach creative director, who dug into the brand’s archives to revisit its icons—such as saddle leather, metal closures and hang-tags on tiny chains.

Interest in vintage Coach continues to rise,cheap womens belstaff jackets. The brand on the Internet is the most-searched luxury handbag globally, ranking higher than Louis Vuitton, Chanel and Gucci, according to Digital Luxury Group, a consulting partner of the Paris-based Luxury Society. “We’ve seen a heightened interest in Coach on eBay,” says an eBay spokeswoman, “particularly around Coach classics, where year-over-year searches for these items are up about 20%.”

Many women have treasured their old Coach handbags, pulling them out periodically to lament the departure from classic design. Coach was once a coming-of-age bag, the first one often earned by a graduation or after nailing that first job. It struck a nice price point&#8212,cheap Jimmy Choo Boots;enough to feel like an investment, but not an irresponsible one.

The company’s origins are in men’s bags, but the look became groovy in the 1960s when ready-to-wear design pioneer Bonnie Cashin introduced Coach bags for women. In the 1970s, the duffel and other Coach designs became “it” bags before that term was coined.

Later, though, Coach stopped evolving along with its consumers. By the ’90s, the brand was being criticized.

“Some people found us stodgy,” says Mr. Frankfort, who joined the company in 1979. Mr,cheap hermes bags. Krakoff, who joined in 1996, quickly won kudos for moving the brand back into the realm of fashion. Coach stock soared over the following years, and it became haute in Japan. It even considered Louis Vuitton a major rival. Yet, the designs became decidedly middlebrow, and fashionable ladies began to abandon the brand.

Then, a funny thing happened during the financial crisis. Trendy young women who turned up their noses at new-Coach began to rediscover old-Coach. They raided their mothers’ closets or sought vintage pieces online. In stores, Coach executives watched their sales of logo bags fall, while sales of leather bags grew.

Actress Michelle Williams was spotted with a vintage Coach duffel slung over her shoulder in Brooklyn in February 2010. Jewelry designer Eddie Borgo picked up a vintage Coach briefcase at a New York City flea market and made it his go-to satchel. Trendy 20-somethings were suddenly combing flea markets and eBay for Coach’s vintage duffels, as well as its Devon, Willis and other bags.

Jessie Holeva, a 24-year-old fashion lover in Philadelphia, came across a Coach Devon bag in a Bryn Mawr, Pa., vintage shop and scooped it up for $14. “It’s classic and not all logo-ed up,” says Ms. Holeva, who maintains a budget-ista fashion blog called TrendHungry.

Mr. Krakoff predicts that Coach’s synthetic logo bags will have their day again,hermes clutch bags. “I think we’re in a cycle now,” he says. So he’s hedging his bets. While the logo bags will be “de-emphasized,” Mr. Krakoff says, Legacy bags emblazoned with logos will be sold at select stores where women retain a preference for logos.

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Corrections & Amplifications
Digital Luxury Group is a consulting partner of the Luxury Society. An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the group as a consulting unit of the Paris-based society.

A version of this article appeared July 12, 2012, on page D3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Coach Comes Around to Reclaim Its Iconic Look.