A used-up, decades-old Birkin bag has proven that the luxury accessory does indeed appreciate in value as time goes by.
The original Hermès Birkin bag, designed and named for British actress and singer Jane Birkin, sold at Sotheby’s in Paris on Thursday for a cool $10.1 million (€8.65 million), setting the new record for the highest-ever sale of a handbag.
The selling price crushed the previous auction record set for a bag — $513,040 paid in 2021 for a Hermès White Himalaya Niloticus Crocodile Diamond Retourne Kelly 28. Sotheby’s said that only one other fashion item has sold for more: a pair of ruby red slippers from “The Wizard of Oz,” which went for $32.5 million in 2024.
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French actress and singer Jane Birkin (right) carries her Birkin bag in Paris in 1990. The bag (left) was auctioned by Sotheby’s on Thursday. (Getty)
The well-worn, handmade, sleek black prototype — still bearing Birkin’s initials and featuring her nail clipper hanging from the strap — landed in the hands of a private Japanese buyer following a “fierce 10-minute bidding war” starting at $1.17 million (€1 million), the international auction house said Thursday.
“The Original Birkin bag is a true one-of-a-kind — a singular piece of fashion history that has grown into a pop culture phenomenon that signals luxury in the most refined way possible,” Morgane Halimi, Sotheby’s head of handbags and fashion, said in a statement announcing the auction.
The bag was designed in 1984 as a collaboration between Birkin and Hermès CEO Jean-Louis Dumas after the pair chatted during a flight. Complaining that the handbags in the ’80s were all too small to fit her busy lifestyle as a young mother in Paris, Birkin reportedly sketched her ideal tote on an airplane vomit bag.
Produced and delivered to her a year later, the original Birkin features several elements that set it apart from the ones that followed, including its nail clippers, bottom studs, gilded brass hardware and nonremovable strap.
The one-of-a-kind design, which Birkin held on to until 1994 when she auctioned it off for an AIDS charity, subsequently inspired commercialized versions that have since become the ultimate status symbol for super-wealthy fashionistas. Some versions of the bag come with a years-long waitlist. In 2016, Teen Vogue declared the Birkin bag was a better investment than gold.
The former lover of French singer Serge Gainsbourg, Birkin died in 2023 after a long battle with leukemia. She was 76.
With News Wire Services
