Fashion history was made this week when THE ORIGINAL Hermes Birkin handbag sold at auction for US$10.1 million, a record price twenty times greater than the previous record of $500,000 (a Hermes Kelly made famous by Princess Grace of Monaco who used it to hide her “baby bump”).
The Birkin Hermes bag, famously designed after a chance conversation between airline passengers in 1969 when Jean-Louis Dumas (the chief executive of Hermès) sat next to actress and rock star (she sang the female lead in the most risqué hit song of all time) Jane Birkin, more than fulfilled expectations becoming a fully-validated fashion icon, if it wasn’t already.
The chance meeting between Dumas and Birkin in which 1960/70s “it girl” Birkin famously advocated a more practical hold-all from Hermes has seen the resultant “Birkin” become consistently one of the most expensive and sought-after bags at auction, regularly pushing the world record price after it was introduced in 1984.
“Je t’aime… moi non plus” (French for ‘I love you… me neither’) is a 1967 song written by Serge Gainsbourg for Brigitte Bardot. In 1969, Gainsbourg recorded the best-known version as a duet with British actress Jane Birkin. Although this version topped the charts in Birkin’s native United Kingdom, the first foreign-language song to do so, and number two in Ireland, it was banned in several countries because of its overtly sexual content. In 1976 Gainsbourg directed Birkin in an erotic film of the same name. Original videoclip (Fontana 1969)
The original prototype Birkin bag created by Dumas for the mother of two style icon borrowed heavily from the existing Hermes Haut A Courroies (HAC) and became known as the largest (Birkin 40) of the subsequent Birkin range now available in 40, 35, 30, 25 and 20 inch sizes.
In one of history’s most publicly tumultuous relationships, British actress Jane Birkin and French musician Serge Gainsborough were the talk of Europe during the swinging sixties and despite a career in film, design, and a brush with the censors, Jane Birkin will always be remembered for the bag she manifested when she sat next to Jean-Louis Dumas on a Paris-London flight in 1969.
While there are dozens of collectible genres dominated by male investors, only one auction genre (handbags) is dominated by women investors – not even collectible jewelry is a solely female auction domain. But in the largely female-only domain of handbags, the record price for a handbag jumped last week to a new high.
