Scrolling through Farfetch, a high fashion resale company, you can see a pre-owned Birkin bag selling for £53,189 with the cheapest one still over £12,000. Why are these bags so sought after, and why are people willing to spend the cost of a VW Golf on a handbag?
Hermès, a French luxury fashion house, sells the renowned Birkin bag which for many years has had a worth tied to it much greater than its monetary value. Birkin bags are the most expensive bags in the world, ranging from $40,000 to $500,00 in price. The value of a Birkin has gone up 500% over the last 35 years, so it is easy to see why some people consider it a better investment than gold or the stock market. I think also if you have a gigantic wealth why wouldn’t you spend so much on a bag?
The bags are named after the French-English singer and actress Jane Birkin, who notoriously carried a straw bag rather than a regular handbag. She met the head of design at Hermès on a plane, when her bag fell out of the overhead locker, spilling the contents everywhere, which sparked him to design a functional bag, that had good storage and obviously was beautiful.
They are high-quality bags, handmade from materials such as calfskin and alligator skin, but where does the rest of the price tag come from? It all comes down to rarity and exclusivity. You can’t just buy a Birkin, you have to be offered the chance to buy a Birkin. Spend enough in Hermès or be deemed important then you might get the offer, but you won’t get to choose what you want. Take or leave what you’re offered, but leave it and you might not get that offer again. Hermès has managed to market their bags so well, that you’re honoured to be offered the chance to spend tens of thousands of pounds on a bag you don’t like all that much.
A machine could maybe do a more accurate job producing a Birkin than a craftsman, and could certainly do a quicker job, but if Birkins were not handmade, there is no doubt that they would not carry the same value. The lack of technology used to make Birkins does feed its value. This is partially because they cannot be mass-produced in the same way, which creates the exclusivity and rarity people seek. Handmade items always use it as a selling point, which shows it is something we value as a society, and that there is a luxurious perception around it.
There are many reasons that handmade items are good. It's an exhibition of human talent, it is much more sustainable when smaller quantities are produced and it provides an income to a real person. It also makes every item unique as you can never fully remove human error, which I love. There is beauty in hand-made, technology-free pieces, which we need to embrace even more – but for the average person like me, I think we’ll be finding it somewhere that is not Hermès.
More about Birkin’s value: https://www.businessinsider.com/hermes-birkin-bag-realreal-handbag-expert-so-expensive-2019-6?r=US&IR=T
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