The news that Jane Birkin’s original Hermès bag has sold for a record-breaking €8.6m (£7.4m) at auction will no doubt cause some jaws to drop to the floor. However, perhaps it should not surprise – this is a bag design that is often linked to eyewatering amounts of money. Forty years on from the prototype, it’s now less a (very expensive) symbol of style and elegance, and more a way to signal you have a lot of money and you would like everyone to know that.
A Birkin has always been expensive – about $10,000 (£7,400), according to the Guardian last year – but the complicating factor is demand. As was reported, two California residents sued Hermès for a practice known as “tying”, which means customers are expected to pre-spend a sufficient amount on other items, such as homewares or jewellery – some say up to $30,000 – before they are even put on the waiting list for a Birkin. Therefore, wearing one on your arm – to those in the know – shows you have the disposable income that not only means you can buy the bag, but also go through with this practice in the first place.
The TV show Your Friends & Neighbours – in which Jon Hamm stars as a banker who loses his job and resorts to stealing from his wealthy friends to keep up his lifestyle – alludes to this in an episode where Hamm’s character attempts to steal a Birkin from an alarmed table of the bags in a luxurious closet. In a montage explaining the lore of the handbag, he comments “there is no more obnoxious or coveted status symbol than the Hermès Birkin”.
It’s hard not to agree. With this culture around the bag, it has lost its fashion appeal. See Beyoncé’s lyric in her 2022 track Summer Renaissance, which replaces the Birkin with the more affordable and fashionable Telfar shopping bag, one so popular in Brooklyn that it’s sometimes called the “Bushwick Birkin”. “This Telfar bag imported,” she sings. “Birkins? Them shit’s in storage.”
The Birkin is now a favourite of glossy and put-together women. Victoria Beckham is said to have more than 100, and Kylie Jenner also collects them (Singaporean socialite Jamie Chua apparently has the biggest collection). For the Sotheby’s auction, it was rumoured that representatives of Lauren Sanchez and Kris Jenner were on the phone attempting to bid, although the bag eventually went to a collector in Japan. An article in Vogue revealed who was in the room: collectors with an eye on the value of this item rather than someone wanting to use it as a receptacle. “I’ve been telling people to invest in Hermès bags for years!” comments Sara Abou-Khalil, a client of Sotheby’s who also collects contemporary art.
All of this contrasts to the bag’s beginnings. Jane Birkin was an icon of bohemianism who campaigned for abortion rights and against the far right and originally donated her bag to an auction to raise money for an Aids charity in 1994. Loved for her style, Birkin was gorgeous and chic but she was also scruffy, with wild hair and clothes that didn’t always appear to be completely ironed.
The original bag shows Birkin’s approach to the design during the nine years she owned it – it’s lived-in: scuffed, with marks from the stickers that she regularly put on it, for organisations such as Unicef.
It’s this part of the bag’s life that remains charming – and influential. A TV clip of her showing what was inside her bag in 1988 is a favourite on TikTok, with a pile of papers, notebooks, pens, mascara and more emerging. The way she decorated her bag is so loved that it inspired the “Birkinifying your bag” trend last year, where people added trinkets and charms. Arguably, this was the prelude to the Labubu craze, with the critters becoming the prized object to have hanging on any bag in 2025. The love of Labubus is already going the way of the Birkin – they retail for about £21, but sell for a lot more: a human-sized doll sold at auction last month for £127,000.
The lesson? Whether it’s a monster with spiky teeth or a battered bag with old stickers, fashion will always find a way to get people to spend a lot of money on obnoxious and coveted status symbols. But who knows? Maybe the buyer is a fan of Birkinifying and they’ll soon be walking around Japan with a bag draped in charms, with a Free Tibet sticker on its £7m leather.
Lauren Cochrane is a senior Guardian fashion writer
