Fashion Geek: The Hermes Birkin

It’s the bag with the largest celebrity following, a notoriously long waiting list and a £3,060 starting price: it couldn’t be anything other than the famous Hermès Birkin.  Named after the celebrated British- born actress Jane Birkin, this handbag, which was first designed in 1984, has become one of the most coveted pieces of arm candy amongst the fashion elite.

The Birkin was created by the company’s CEO, Jean Louis Dumas, after he was sat next to Brit actress and singer Jane Birkin on a flight from Paris to London. Birkin reportedly expressed to Dumas her irritation at the lack of suitably sized leather weekend bags and soon after, voila, the first ever Birkin – a sort of big sister to the Kelly bag- was dispatched to Ms Birkin.  Or so the legend goes.

Whilst us mere mortals can only dream of being able to afford such a luxurious accessory, it is extremely popular with A-listers, including Katie Holmes, Elle Macpherson and Kate Moss. Its greatest fan however seems to be Victoria Beckham, who reportedly owns over one hundred Hermès bags, worth around a staggering £1.5 million in total.

The Hermès Birkin is a statement in itself, emanating timeless beauty due to its classic styling. It comes in a wide range of exotic animal hides in a variety of colours. All bags are lined with fine goatskin; the most expensive is manufactured from saltwater crocodile skin. The Birkin is handcrafted and it takes around about two weeks to produce just one standard leather bag, production time for rarer skins takes considerably longer. It is one of the hardest handbags to actually get hold of with a three-year waiting list due to the high demand for the various opulent animal skins that Hermès uses to create a number of their more costly handbags.

The Birkin is the quintessential ‘It’ bag, even if that term has become a little unfashionable of late.  Some handbag names have come and gone (the ‘Misha’ anyone?), but this one has become part of our fashion vocab. Recognition of this status came when Sex and the City dedicated a storyline to the Birkin, in the same way that it incorporated Jimmy Choo and Manolo Blahnik into the plots.

The incredibly hefty price tag means that only a select and very lucky few can actually have the Birkin as part of their own personal handbag collection, but there is no denying that it is a real investment piece. They regularly sell for the original price on eBay, with some varieties of the bag being auctioned off for as much as £50,000. For the rest of us, owning a Hermès Birkin remains something of a dream. For the time being, a Topshop number does the job nicely.