Hermès Birkin luggage are probably the most coveted—and worthwhile—purses on this planet. Few equipment have held such a agency grip on popular culture and style. Because the Intercourse and the Metropolis character Samantha Jones mentioned in an episode with a whole subplot devoted to her mission to acquire one: “It’s not a bag, it’s a Birkin.”
For this reason it was with a lot fanfare that Sotheby’s introduced final month it could promote the Birkin prototype that belonged to the inspiration and namesake behind the design, the late French British actress Jane Birkin. And on Thursday (10 July), that buzz proved to be warranted: the scuffed, 50-year-old purse bought for an eye-watering €8.6m in Paris.
Bidding opened at €1m, eliciting a pant from the viewers within the Sotheby’s Paris salesroom. Even that preliminary bid almost doubled the earlier world file for a purse at public sale, set in 2021. A ten-minute bidding battle between 9 collectors over telephones, on-line and within the room drove the value as much as €8.6m with charges, finally going to a collector in Japan, the public sale home mentioned.
However what makes the Birkin bag, and its connection to Jane Birkin, so particular? Because the now-legendary story goes, Birkin occurred to be seated close to Jean-Louis Dumas, the then-chairman of the Hermès group, on an Air France flight. When Birkin complained to Dumas that she struggled to discover a bag that suited her busy life as a mom, he got down to create the right bag for her—in 1985, Hermès introduced her with a prototype, and requested her permission to call it the Birkin. The remaining is historical past.
Followers chalk up the recognition of the Birkin—and an analogous Hermès mannequin, the Kelly—to the bag’s clear strains, knowledgeable craftsmanship and rarity. It’s also a standing image, except for its hefty price ticket; you can’t simply stroll right into a retailer and purchase one off the shelf. Hermès is known to make its well-heeled clients leap by means of hoops to even be provided a possibility to buy the extra fashionable types, with unofficial spend quotas.
Restricted manufacturing and lengthy ready lists have led to a flourishing secondary market, the place the luggage usually fetch even greater costs than they do in Hermès boutiques. House owners are likely to deal with their luggage with white gloves, so to talk, to keep up their resale worth and shield their funding. (Such a system could sound acquainted to these concerned within the modern artwork market.)
A detailed-up of the bag, as bought by Sotheby’s Paris Courtesy Sotheby’s
This isn’t the angle Jane had—the actress carried the prototype for years, and it reveals. The unique bag is weathered and well-worn, and it even bears sticker marks from charities like Unicef. Jane was a vocal activist, and she or he as soon as requested Hermès to cease utilizing her identify to market some luggage over the model’s use of unique animal skins, although they later reconciled.
As artwork spending falls, public sale homes and even business galleries have honed in on luxurious items like jewelry, purses, vehicles and sneakers in hopes of attracting new clients. Hermès luggage are sometimes present in Sotheby’s and Christie’s luxurious gross sales.
Then once more, Birkin luggage usually are not for everybody. They could not have even been for Jane within the latter years of her life. In 2017, she revealed the unthinkable: that her namesake bag not suited her way of life, and she or he most popular to hold no purse in any respect.
“It is a very, very heavy bag,” Jane instructed the BBC. “Now I fill my pockets like a person, as a result of then you do not even have to hold something.”
