The very first of the famed Hermès Birkin handbags, owned by the late actor Jane Birkin, sold for $10.1 million on Thursday.
Following the sale, Sotheby’s described it on social media as the most valuable handbag ever to be sold at auction. The black, leather bag was the product of a chance meeting on an airplane in 1984 and has since become a symbol of wealth and elevated social status.
Birkin was a British-born actor with a successful career in French films, starring in world cinema classics like “La Piscine” and “Blow-Up.” The legend goes that she was using a straw basket as a purse while on a flight from Paris to London, catching the attention of her in-flight neighbor.
That fellow passenger was Jean-Louis Dumas, then-chief executive of the Hermès fashion house.
According to Hermès, Birkin told Dumas “that she couldn’t find a bag suitable for her needs as a young mother.”
“A born creator with a keen eye, he immediately sketched a supple and spacious rectangular holdall with a burnished flap and saddle stitching,” the brand said.
Author Marisa Meltzer, who wrote a book about Birkin, said in a video for Sotheby’s that the bag took on a life of its own. She noted that the bag was difficult to obtain after Birkin was seen out with it, and it remained an item of scarcity.
“I would say that the Birkin was an accidental icon,” Meltzer said.
A Birkin bag generally sells for between $20,000 and $30,000, but the price can go up dramatically on the secondary market. The price depends on various factors such as color, material and whether it was a limited-edition design.
Buying a Birkin bag is a complicated process as well. The bags are not sold on the internet and require a shopper to enter an Hermès boutique, where the selection is limited and a sales associate has the right to deny someone the opportunity to buy if there’s a waiting list.
That scarcity is why many consider a Birkin bag to be the mark of elite social and financial status.
And though she provided the inspiration for the bag, Birkin rarely carried one later in her life. She told the BBC in 2017 that she found the bag to be “too heavy.”
“Now I fill my pockets like a man, because then you don’t actually have to carry anything,” Birkin said.
Birkin received bags as a gift from the fashion house over the years and actually sold some of the handbags to raise money for causes that were important to her. She sold the original Birkin at an auction for a French AIDS charity in 1994.
“Jane famously adorned it with stickers supporting Médecins du Monde and UNICEF, transforming the luxury handbag into a powerful symbol of her humanitarian efforts,” Sotheby’s said on its website.
She told The Believer magazine that she had the good fortune of being able to afford designer clothing, but never thought much of it.
“I never considered myself as a fashion icon and, in our days, nobody was. No one had contracts with fashion houses. We just wore exactly what we wanted,” she said.
The former actor, singer and fashion icon suffered a stroke in 2021 and died in 2023 at the age of 76.