Why has this obsession endured?
The world is in the throes of Birkin mania.
This month the original Birkin bag, made by Hermès for British actor Jane Birkin in 1984, sold for US$10.1 million ($16.6m) at Sotheby’s in Paris.
The way Birkin wore it, festooned with nail clippers and stickers
On social media, explainers proliferate on how to emulate Birkin’s late 1960s carefree, bourgeois-bohemian style, with sheer crocheted dresses and ballet flats.
All of this is happening two years after her death on July 16, 2023, after a cancer diagnosis and more than a decade of treatment.
She was a cult figure, particularly outside France, where she lived most of her life. Birkin, who was born in London, became a revered actor who appeared in more than 70 films and a musician whose most famous song, Je t’aime … moi non plus (I Love You … Me Neither), with Serge Gainsbourg, was a worldwide hit. It was banned by the Vatican for its lasciviousness, and Birkin responded that the Pope was their best publicist. In 2023, the black-walled house on the Left Bank where the couple lived opened as a museum, and tickets to tour the residence sell out months in advance.
In Jane B. by Agnès V., a 1988 documentary directed by Agnès Varda that was made as Birkin was turning 40, she dumps out the contents of her original black Birkin bag – the first “What’s in My Bag” video perhaps? Out of the beaten-up black vessel tumble multiple notebooks, a Swiss Army knife, newspaper clippings, Maybelline Great Lash mascara, pencils, cash, cigarettes, a Fyodor Dostoyevsky novel and Scotch tape. She fixes her gaze on the camera with a wry look and says: “Find out anything after seeing what’s in the bag? Even when you show it all, you reveal very little.”
Jane Birkin knew that the bag had more name recognition than she did. During her life, people would ask if she was the same Birkin as the bag. She’d say, “Yes, and the bag is going to sing now!”
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Advertise with NZME.In person, 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. The nail clippers she had dangled from the bag were still there.
It was designed with Jean-Louis Dumas, then the Hermès CEO. In a kind of rom-com-style meet-cute, the two sat next to each other on a flight from London to Paris and came up with the idea for a holdall that would be more suitable than the baskets Birkin had carried as bags since she was a teenager.
“She didn’t treat it as an art piece,” said Adam Lena, a couture dealer from Warsaw, Poland, who went to the public viewing at Sotheby’s. “It’s just a normal bag for every day. That’s the amazing thing about it. She didn’t treat it as an heirloom.”
Everyone else has a very different relationship to the bag. It’s nearly impossible to walk into an Hermès store and just buy one. Someone who wants a Birkin has to establish a relationship as a customer of the house, often buying scarves or wallets or sweaters or smaller bags before they are “offered” one, in Hermès parlance.
The bag cost US$2000 ($3,300) when it was released in the mid-1980s. Today the least expensive Birkin at US retail would sell for more than US$10,000 ($16,500), depending on the size, colour and material – tariffs and state taxes notwithstanding.
Interest in Birkins has boomed all summer. Luxury e-commerce site 1stDibs sent out a news release that noted a surge in searches for Birkin bags, with a 484% year-over-year increase in the first three months of 2025 and a 5% rise in the week after the Sotheby’s auction announcement in early June.
On the secondhand market, the bag is in such high demand that buyers have to pay a hefty premium. Resee, a luxury consignor in Paris, lists a well-used taupe Birkin for €8140 (about $15,860) and a yellow alligator one for €50,860 (about $99,100).
Faye Landes, a longtime retail analyst, said the value of the Birkin prototype was closely entwined with Jane Birkin’s status as an icon – a category of person as rare and coveted as the handbag she carried.
“Very few people have either the talent or the resources” to become one, she said.
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Advertise with NZME.At 4.16pm July 10, bidding on the bag began. Some 270 participants from 38 countries had registered for that day’s auction after the bag had been displayed in Asia, Europe and the United States.
After an invitation-only cocktail party for clients, during which Sotheby’s served Champagne and chocolates shaped like tiny Birkin bags, the bidding began. As in a scene from a movie, there were gasps as the figure rose from US$1.7 million ($2.8m), rapidly increasing in a nine-way bidding war that played out over 10 tense minutes.
One bidder was Jennifer Rubio, a founder of the Away luggage company.
“I was worried it might disappear into a private collection, never to be seen again,” Rubio wrote in an email. “I bid on it with the intention of donating the bag to a museum like the Costume Institute at the Met because I genuinely believe it belongs in the public eye. It deserves to be preserved not as a luxury object, but as a cultural artefact, one that carries Jane Birkin’s legacy and the cultural mythology the bag has taken on over the decades.”
The bidding ended at US$10.1m ($16.7m), including a buyer’s premium, the bag going to Valuence, a Japanese fashion conglomerate. Strangers cheered and hugged one another. The Birkin broke all kinds of records. It became the most valuable handbag ever sold at auction. It outsold the hat of Emperor Napoleon I and Princess Diana’s sheep sweater.
“The identity of the buyer was a bit of a letdown since it’s a corporation capitalising on the Birkin legacy to promote its own brand, rather than a private collector or institution with a deep appreciation for the craft and the story,” said Julie Brener Davich, who writes about the auction world for Puck. A news release from Valuence stated that it intended to exhibit the bag.
Representatives for Hermès did not respond to a request for comment on the auction.
The truth is that owning a Birkin has become shorthand for making it. Many Real Housewives and Kardashian-Jenners own them. (RickDick, the name of an artificial intelligence meme artist on Instagram, posted a parody video of Kim Kardashian breaking the glass of the Sotheby’s display and stealing the bag. Kardashian reposted it.) Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, another perpetual object of style obsession, owned a large black one. So what could be more indicative of success than owning the original Birkin?
What would Jane Birkin think of all this? It’s a good question, one I’ve been pondering in the past two years as I worked on my biography, “It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin”.
She was known to have a very dry, very healthy sense of humour. Her friends once ordered a cake shaped like a Birkin bag for her birthday.
As someone who eschewed plastic surgery on her own face, she would probably find the so-called Birkin Body – a $75,000 ($124,000) body lift from the neck to the knees offered by Dr Ryan Neinstein – darkly funny.
She was a lifelong progressive activist who would have loved that her name was appropriated in the Bushwick Birkin – the nickname for the Telfar Shopping Bag popular with creative types, particularly among people of colour and within the queer community.
She might even have taken a shine to the divisive Labubus. She’d had a beloved stuffed toy named Munkey since childhood until she buried it with Gainsbourg, her former lover who died in 1991.
Her burial plot is just a few yards away in Montparnasse Cemetery in an overgrown English secret garden where fans leave tokens for her: miniature bulldog figurines, headshots, notes, bouquets of sunflowers.
Birkin lived a life full of surprises and contradictions as she confronted motherhood, sexuality, fame, consent, abuse, respect.
It is a legacy that is complex and worth looking at closely. Her image was taken away from her, over and over, yet she worked to take it back and wrestle with her own history.
She owned five Birkin bags over the course of her life, and she remained close to the brand, even walking the runway for designer Martin Margiela’s now highly coveted ready-to-wear collections for Hermès. The fine knits and loose, slightly masculine trousers suited her personal style in middle age and beyond, which doesn’t have as many style explainers but should.
But the Hermès bag that is synonymous with her to this day? Its creation myth didn’t warrant even a sentence in Birkin’s diary. Her life cannot be summed up in one outfit, one relationship, one song, one role or even one bag.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Marisa Meltzer
Photographs by: Dmitry Kostyukov
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
