A bag by the French fashion house Hermès, made 40 years ago especially for the Franco-British actress Jane Birkin (1946-2023), was sold at auction in Paris for a record sum. This was reported by the BFMTV channel with reference to the Sotheby’s auction house.
The bag, handmade in 1984, went under the hammer for €8.6 million. This is 20 times more than the previous record, which belonged to the Kelly Hermès bag, which was sold for €438 thousand.
The starting price of the Birkin bag at the auction was €1 million, but, as the channel reports, the price quickly increased many times over.
According to one version, the actress complained to her neighbor on the Paris-London plane that she could not find a comfortable bag for carrying children’s things. The neighbor turned out to be Jean-Louis Dumas, who held the post of head of Hermès at that time. A few months later, on Dumas’s initiative, a model of a bag with special compartments for milk bottles was created.
The demand for bags named after the actress has since grown so much that they can only be purchased by appointment due to shortages. Even counterfeit bags are purchased by the most impatient fashionistas for the same price as the original.
