\u201cI assumed,\u201d she replies.<\/p>\n
\u201cFive years,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n
\u201cFor a bag?\u201d she says, shocked.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a bag,\u201d he explains. \u201cIt\u2019s a Birkin.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was 24 years ago. Today, prices start around US$12,000 ($21,000), and some bags sell for more, making the Birkin one of fashion\u2019s most coveted and extravagant status symbols. Customers can\u2019t just walk into Herm\u00e8s and buy the purse; they go through an elaborate process of purchasing other products and then, after months or years, might be offered one of what the brand calls its \u201cquota bags\u201d. Demand is so great that the bags are instantly worth more on the resale market; there are hundreds of knockoffs, including last year\u2019s US$78 \u201cWirkin\u201d dupe sold by Walmart.<\/p>\n
The “Birkin” bag by Hermes which belonged to Jane Birkin at the Sotheby’s auction house in Paris in July, 2025. Photo \/ Alain Jocard, AFP <\/p>\n
There are collectors with hundreds, including rare and custom pieces. But nothing is more collectible than the very first bag, created in 1984 for actor Jane Birkin. The black leather satchel \u2013 beat up, stained, scratched \u2013 sold for US$10.1 million in July, making it the most expensive handbag and second-most-expensive fashion item sold at auction (bested only by the US$32m ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz). The buyer was Japanese businessman Shinsuke Sakimoto, head of a luxury resale company.<\/p>\n
In a new book, It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin, Marisa Meltzer explores the woman who inspired it all. Meltzer, a devout Francophile, was curious about the English girl who found love and stardom in France. Meltzer writes that she once dismissed Birkin as a glorified accessory to the famous men in her life. The irony, of course, is that now she\u2019s best known as the name behind the most coveted accessory in fashion.<\/p>\n
It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin by Marisa Meltzer. Photo \/ Atria via The Washington Post<\/p>\n
Birkin was a long-limbed, wide-eyed beauty born into an upper-class British family in 1946. Her father was a wealthy businessman, her mother an actress. As a teenager she loved fashion and fun, and came of age during London\u2019s swinging \u201960s without, it appears, much adult supervision. A few small theatre and film roles led to a naked romp in Michelangelo Antonioni\u2019s Blow-Up and fame as a free-spirited nymphet.<\/p>\n
She fell in love with 30-year-old John Barry, the composer for multiple James Bond movies, and married him as soon as she turned 18. Two years later, she was the mother of a baby girl and headed for divorce. By then, Birkin had moved to Paris to pursue acting and begun a notorious romance with Serge Gainsbourg, France\u2019s celebrated and controversial singer-songwriter.<\/p>\n
The twice-divorced Gainsbourg \u2013 a cross between Bob Dylan and Woody Allen \u2013 was magnetic, passionate, controlling and 18 years older than Birkin. He had a penchant for very young women and loved to push boundaries, even the liberal sexual mores of Europe. Their affair lasted 12 years and made Birkin one of the most photographed and famous women in France.<\/p>\n
She was his lover, his muse, his Lolita. Together they were a sensation, rubbing shoulders with famous friends in restaurants and nightclubs. She was cast as the sexy ingenue in popular French films; he wrote, acted, grabbed headlines and pushed boundaries with songs like Je t\u2019aime \u2026 moi non plus, a duet with Birkin that sounded like two people making love. It was a smash hit, so popular that the Vatican denounced it, which made it even more popular.<\/p>\n
Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg in 1970. Photo \/ Getty Images<\/p>\n
There was one more famous lover, French director Jacques Doillon \u2013 yet another problematic romance with a difficult man. It was complicated: Birkin now had three daughters: one with Barry, one with Gainsbourg and one with Doillon.<\/p>\n
Like many actors, Birkin was romantic, insecure, malleable. There is no shame in poor choices \u2013 we\u2019ve all made them \u2013 but Birkin jumped from bad guy to worse guy and then another bad guy with a lot of drama and not much reflection. Some of that can be written off to the limited career opportunities and expectations for women 65 years ago, but there is also the lingering sense that she took the path of least resistance most of the time.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe sought out a very particular type of love; one that was dizzying with a roller coaster of emotional highs and lows,\u201d Meltzer writes. \u201cWhen describing her definition of romance, the word I keep coming back to is \u2018adolescent.\u2019 She got her first taste of fame around the time she got her first taste of dating. She spent the rest of her life chasing that same cocktail of feelings.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meltzer captures the sense of carelessness \u2013 intentional and benign \u2013 that marked Birkin\u2019s life. The actress\u2019 parents were oddly unconcerned about their teenage daughter\u2019s relationship with a creepy older neighbour; her formal education ended at age 16; they allowed her, at 18, to marry a divorced man 13 years her senior. Birkin, in turn, bounced through adulthood and parenthood without much of a plan, protected by fame and enough money to wing it. She balanced her acting career \u2013 usually playing some version of herself \u2013 and her singing (her voice was iffy at best) with a turbulent private life. She hoped to be taken seriously as an artist; instead, she remained frozen in time.<\/p>\n
CANNES, FRANCE – JULY 08: Jane Birkin attends the “Jane Par Charlotte (Jane By Charlotte)” photocall during the 74th annual Cannes Film Festival on July 08, 2021 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Stephane Cardinale – Corbis\/Corbis via Getty Images)<\/p>\n
In her epilogue, Meltzer explores the question of whether the men in Birkin\u2019s life sexually exploited a vulnerable young woman. It\u2019s tricky to judge any era by present standards \u2013 Birkin never claimed she was abused and defended Gainsbourg from accusations that he was a harasser and misogynist. But, M<\/p>\n
eltzer writes, Birkin repeatedly overlooked inconvenient truths to maintain her relationships with these partners. \u201cYou can\u2019t judge things by other epoques, you can\u2019t measure them by this extraordinary state that Me Too has made,\u201d Birkin said in a 2020 interview with the Times of London.<\/p>\n