Hermès Birkin

The Birkin is a large, soft leather holdall, roughly rectangular, wider at the base than the top, with two rolled handles standing up from the body. A flap folds forward over the opening and is held by two narrow straps that pass through a metal turn-lock; a small padlock hangs from the front and its key sits in a leather bell on one handle. The stitching is Hermès' saddle-stitching, and each bag is the work of a single craftsman.

It was conceived in the air in 1984. Jane Birkin, the English actress and singer who had made her life in France, found herself beside Jean-Louis Dumas, the chairman of Hermès, on a flight from Paris to London, and complained that she could never find a bag that held what a young mother had to carry. Dumas sketched one on the spot: supple, roomy, with space for a baby's bottles. Hermès made the first one in supple black leather and, with her agreement, gave it her name.

The bag she carried for the next nine years was a prototype, a little different in size, with a shoulder strap and brass fittings, and her initials stamped on it. It sold at Sotheby's in Paris in 2025 for €8.6 million. The bags made since lost the shoulder strap and changed the hardware, but the form Dumas drew has not moved: the sizes now run 25, 30, 35 and 40 centimetres, in calf, ostrich, crocodile and the rest.

Hermès makes it in its own workshops in France and sells it only in its own shops, never online, which has helped turn a practical bag into a byword for scarcity. Birkin herself was amused and slightly alarmed by that; she joked that people would remember the bag rather than her films. She used hers until it wore out.