Jane Birkin's original Hermès bag sells for millions

A fortnight ago, at Sotheby’s in Paris, the bag Hermès executive Jean-Louis Dumas made for Jane Birkin – the original Birkin bag – sold for €8.6 million. That is the highest price ever fetched at auction for a handbag. The funny thing is, for such a coveted item, nobody seems to be able to agree on exactly what it is for.

“The original Birkin looks as if it might have been found in a shipwreck, with its fraying handles and mottled leather patina and marks from where she had affixed Doctors Without Borders and Unicef stickers,” says Marisa Meltzer in The New York Times. “The nail clippers she had dangled from the bag were still there.” In a video from 1988, the late actress and singer empties the contents onto a table. Out spills mascara, cigarettes, money, a novel by Dostoyevsky and sticky tape – not surprising, perhaps, when you consider the now-legendary story about the bag’s origins. In 1984, Birkin found herself sitting next to Dumas, the Hermès executive, on a flight to Paris, and the two came up with the idea of creating a holdall to hold all the 38-year-old’s stuff.

But such is the allure of Jane Birkin that the holdall went from being a functional item to the most prized bag on the planet. Even today, two years after Birkin passed away, you cannot simply walk into a Hermès shop and buy a Birkin. You have to be invited. Only then can you expect to pay around £7,500 for the privilege.

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Auction winners often like to remain anonymous, but not two weeks ago. Valuence, the Japanese fashion company that won the auction, announced to the world in a press release that it had “successfully acquired the ‘Original Birkin’ bag created by Hermès for actress Jane Birkin, a one-of-a-kind prototype that gave birth to the most coveted handbag design in the world”. When the bag arrives in Japan, Valuence will “host a press unveiling for media and related stakeholders”. The original Birkin has morphed, again, into a ¥1.47 billion piece of publicity for the company.

“With this culture around the bag, it has lost its fashion appeal,” says Lauren Cochrane in The Guardian. Other, younger challenger bags are encroaching on its turf, such as the current “must-have”, the Telfar shopping bag, nicknamed the “Bushwick Birkin”.

Meanwhile, a whole industry of brands selling items linked to celebrities – from footwear to skin care and gin – has arisen since the Birkin bag appeared over 40 years ago. And those nail clippers, they have been credited with starting the trend for adorning one’s bag with baubles, currently in the guise of Labubu dolls.

What would Birkin have made of her €9 million bag? “It’s a good question,” says Meltzer in The New York Times. That the bag’s creation myth is never mentioned in her diary perhaps gives us a clue, she says. But also, just maybe, as with the $75,000 “Birkin Body” cosmetic procedure, she would have found it “darkly funny”.

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