The Birkin Bag

French actress and singer Jane Birkin's original Birkin Bag was a black leather handbag covered with stickers documenting the actress' travels around the world. After a meeting between the actress and Jean-Louis Dumas on a plane, where they discussed the ideal handbag, Hermes created the first Birkin Bag in 1984. Since then, the company has produced around 70000 Birkin Bags a year, they say, to preserve the exclusivity of the handbag. The waiting time for a Birkin Bag was up to six years. The original Birkin Bag of the French actress and singer Jane Birkin was auctioned for charity in 2011. After a report about the use of crocodile leather for the production of Hermès bags, published in 2015, Jane Birkin withdrew her collaboration. In 2017, a Birkin bag was auctioned at Christies in Hogkong for USD 380,000. The New Xork Times reported in 2019 that there are more than 1 million Birkin Bags on the market. In the series Gilmore Girls, the son of a show magnate Logan Hansburger presents his girlfriend with a Birkin Bag. In Sex and the City, Samantha puts herself on the waiting list for a Birkin bag. To shorten the waiting time, she puts the name of one of the celebtrities she looks after on the list. She finds out and claims the delivered Birkin bag for herself. In the memoir "The Primates of Park Avenue", written by Wednesday Martin, she reports on the Birkin Bag as a symbol of social status on the Upper East Side. In the years that followed, numerous renowned bag manufacturers brought out successors to the Birkin Bag. The style of the original Birkin Bag still runs through all collections today. They created the Birkin Bags of today.