Back in 1983, Jean-Louis Dumas, then chief executive of French luxury brand Hermès, was sitting next to a 37-year-old Jane Birkin on an Air France flight from Paris to London. The story goes that Dumas noticed that his companion’s beloved open-top straw basket bag kept falling over, tipping its contents across the floor. He sketched the design (on the back of a sick bag) for what would come to be known as the Birkin bag there and then.
What Dumas couldn’t have known is that his creation — with its clou ‘feet’, semi-structured body and, importantly for Birkin, turnlock closure — would go on to become a global icon, boasting a reported waiting list of some six years, and commanding prices of £8,800 upwards new and even greater sums at resale. In 2022, Sotheby’s sold a Diamond Himalaya Birkin 30 for over $450,000.
