The story behind the ultimate ‘It girl’ bag, the Birkin
The Birkin bag has achieved its own place in the culture. In this extract from a new book, we learn more of the chance partnership between actor-singer Jane Birkin and the Hermes boss that began in first class, of course.
The story of the Birkin bag began as the ultimate serendipitous meet-cute. Jane Birkin was on an Air France flight to London from Paris in 1983 and had been upgraded to first class. The basket bag she carried, her signature since her London years, was in poor shape. Partner Jacques Doillon had reversed his car over the bag a few days prior after a petty but nonetheless deeply felt argument, which he capped off by yelling, “It’s terrible for you to be known for your object.”
As she boarded the plane, all her life’s effects were falling out of it: wallet, keys, pens, business cards, diapers for their daughter Lou, cigarettes, glasses. The man seated next to her eyed the scenario and suggested she should consider owning a bag with pockets. She sighed and told him that the day Hermes made one with pockets, that would be lovely and she would buy it. He responded that he was Hermes, so he could do exactly that.
The man in question was Jean-Louis Dumas, then the chief executive of Hermes and the sixth generation of family leadership in the most vaunted of French luxury houses. It is a name that rings with intimations of status: money – bags often sell for close to $US15,000 ($23,000); scarcity (the bags are such a luxury that there are often waiting lists to land one); and craftsmanship (each bag is assembled by a single person).
Hermes was founded in 1837 by Thierry Hermes, whose entire family died during the Napoleonic Wars or from sicknesses. He apprenticed making harnesses for 16 years before becoming a master craftsman and opening a shop in Paris, where he specialised in saddles. As the 19th century turned into the 20th and affluent customers were buying more cars than horses, Hermes diversified and began to use its craftsmen to make leather goods.
With cars and trains plus greater social mobility during the first few decades of the 20th century, travel increased, and so did demand for high-quality leather goods. (For example, Louis Vuitton had built a fortune on trunks that were flat and ideally suited for train travel rather than traditional trunks with rounded tops that were designed for rain to roll off when they were stowed in the open atop carriages.) At the time they began to produce their leather goods, Hermes was unbranded, but those in the know understood the quality associated with the bags (an early harbinger of so-called quiet luxury, perhaps).
The Hermes signature was – and remains – its saddle stitch, a technique where two needles pass over a single hole in a way that cannot be replicated by a machine.
In the 1950s, the company reached a new level of visibility, with pop culture and fashion colliding in a way that signalled the brand’s pre-eminence. American actor Grace Kelly was photographed in Life magazine leaving a building with her husband, holding her Hermes sac a main de voyage, a travel handbag, over her abdomen. The world would soon learn she was trying to hide the fact she was pregnant with her first daughter with Prince Rainier of Monaco. Hermes had designed the bag in 1935 but renamed it the Kelly bag after this legendary pairing was spotted. The Kelly became what is to this day a classic It bag.
Though there was high demand for a Kelly, the Hermes customer base was still made up of a small coterie of the ultra-wealthy. There was not yet the push for mass-market luxury or even the idea of accessible luxury.
But houses like Hermes and Louis Vuitton needed to produce popular bags because women, especially the younger generation, were buying fewer gloves and hats and evening bags. Department stores that once had large counters dedicated solely to evening gloves had scaled down such inventory. But a nice big handbag that could fit everything that women carried with them? Still an open market.
Birkin asked her seatmate why the company didn’t yet make a handbag that was bigger than the Kelly but smaller and lighter than its Haut a Courroies, which her ex, Serge Gainsbourg, had carried for years. Dumas was intrigued, as Hermes was dealing with a generational crisis of how to evolve the company without losing its core customers.
Proper, petit bourgeois adults sought out the Kelly and their other bags. And Queen Elizabeth II of England and lesser matrons were avid fans of the brand’s printed silk scarfs.
But Hermes wasn’t exactly cool in the eyes of baby boomers, who were starting to age into real spending power. With its orange boxes and quirky prints, Hermès could be seen as whimsical, but it was usually associated with uptight parents and grandparents.
Dumas asked Birkin what her idea might look like. She got out the only paper she could find, which was an airsick bag in the seat back in front of her, and got to sketching a trapezoidal bag. It looked more casual than the Kelly, with two handles like a tote, and somewhat resembled a shrunken version of the Haut a Courroies Gainsbourg owned. Dumas said he would make one for her, though Birkin didn’t think much about it.
A month later, Birkin was asked to come in and see a maquette, a prototype of the bag that a designer had constructed out of paper – akin to how a fashion designer might make a muslin version of a dress for fittings. She fiddled with it and went through leather samples and offered her opinion on which ones would be nice with the design.
The process of making an Hermes bag is notoriously laborious, to the point where the company claims a craftsperson should be able to see a bag on the street and recognise on sight whether they had personally made it. A Kelly bag could take around 20 hours, but the bag Birkin helped design was more complicated and took about 40 hours to complete.
In 1984, Birkin got another call from Hermes that her special-ordered bag was ready. Birkin’s bag was black box, a kind of calf leather, with gilded brass hardware, fashioned in a rectangular shape with saddle stitching and a burnished flap embossed with the initials JB. The bag was about 16 inches high and 18 inches wide (40.6cm x 45.7cm) and had a shoulder strap and, like the Kelly, a lock and key. And, importantly, it did indeed hold everything Birkin needed – useful and luxurious.
Dumas liked the bag Birkin had created enough that he wanted to make it part of their permanent collection, and to name the style after her – like the Kelly, but this would be the Birkin. “With pleasure,” she responded.
Hermes was not the only company to name bags after famous clients: Gucci made a Jackie bag after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and Dior later named one for Princess Diana.
The lauded French house of Hermes naming a bag after Birkin was claiming her for the French-speaking world the way they had claimed Grace Kelly after she moved to Monaco. It was a way of adopting her into the fold. Not that she gave up all her old British style traits – she still carried her basket bags, sometimes together with a Birkin if she had enough belongings to fill them both.
In naming the bag for her, Hermes was not asking her to model or endorse it. As a practice, Hermes did not – and to this day does not – do celebrity ad campaigns. Without that kind of splashy announcement, it often takes time for a product to take off, and the Birkin was no exception. The bag was also subtle for the mid-1980s, without overt logos or loud branding. And it was an investment, costing $US2000 ($6000 adjusted for today’s inflation).
The Birkin intrigued the core Hermes customers, who lived in the tony 16th arrondissement, where Birkin herself lived, or on the equally tony Upper East Side in New York City.
It was large enough to put in a planner (and, later, a laptop computer) and a big wallet and go to work, but it wasn’t some anonymous leather tote; it was expensive and not easily purchased. That combination gave the bag enduring appeal.
The Birkin bag spread from denizens of wealthy neighbourhoods to the world of celebrities, evolving from a much-desired accessory to a cultural touchpoint thanks to the scarcity market around it. Hermes didn’t have to release sales figures of the Birkin, which created an additional layer of mystery: How many people were buying them? How many were even being made?
Within about a decade of coming out, the Birkin was embraced by an array of celebrities, usually photographed with it held prominently on the forearm to prove that they could get their hands on one: from Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and Melania Trump to Heidi Klum and Catherine Zeta-Jones to Lil’ Kim and Beyonce.
The bag hit the larger zeitgeist when it became a plot point on Gilmore Girls and on Sex and the City, where in a 2001 episode public relations exec Samantha Jones uses the name of her client, real-life actor Lucy Liu, to procure a Birkin for herself. When her ruse is discovered, she utters the memorable line: “It’s not a bag, it’s a Birkin!”
A true statement if there ever was one. Owning a Birkin was synonymous with making it. On NPR in 2015, Wednesday Martin, the author of Primates of Park Avenue, a book that took a wry anthropological view of the life of wealthy women, was a guest. She said a woman she’d spotted striding the streets of Manhattan with a Birkin convinced her she needed one.
“We were the only people on the sidewalk, and as she walked toward me, rather than keeping to the right, she was slowly but surely walking, sort of, at me so that I had to move further and further to the right,” she said. “And I was ceding more and more sidewalk territory to her until, finally, I found myself stopping right up against this garbage can that she had sort of walked me into, then she brushed right by me with her handbag.
“That was a dominance display, and that woman used her handbag to do it … That was the moment when I realised that handbags are really important in New York. And if I want to play ball on the Upper East Side, I better stop walking around with this white plastic bag with a couple of bananas in it. I better saddle up.”
The Birkin was not a one-season sensation. It’s a bag with a history and a proven track record. A 2024 article in Fortune pointed out that, since the value of a Birkin doubles about every five years, it is a superior investment to gold. But its overt luxury doesn’t quite square with Jane Birkin’s image. She was born into an upper-class family, but she wasn’t an idle lady-who-lunches type. She fancied herself more of a hippie. In France they have a name for those children of May ’68 who wanted revolution and equality but also objects and wealth and entertainment and social status: gauche caviar, or caviar left, their equivalent of “champagne socialists” or “limousine liberals”.
Birkin embraced her namesake bag, but she did so in a way authentic to her and how she lived: carrying it everywhere as her everyday bag and cramming it with a Mary Poppins amount of stuff, including dog treats, expired prescriptions, Elizabeth Arden cream and spare clothes, much as she had with her basket bags. Her friends deemed it a mobile warehouse, and Birkin said her bag weighed as much as a dead donkey. She let the bag get completely beat-up – not merely some scratches and patina from wear but covered in stickers and key chains and with a nail clipper hanging off the handle. It made such a jangling sound that one could hear Birkin before seeing her approach.
“Of course, that free feeling is why we love Jane Birkin and that Birkin specifically. She’s in a moment wearing her item! Living her truth. Try bottling that to sell a product,” wrote fashion journalist Liana Satenstein. “After all, we don’t want the Birkin, we want Jane.”
This is an edited extract from It Girl: The Life & Legacy of Jane Birkin by Marisa Metzer. Published by Simon & Schuster. The paperback is out now.
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